The market will also be looking for any commentary from A&L on takeover speculation, after Cr?t Agricole was recently named as a potential suitor.Overseas, the Wall Street investment banking giants Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs are both reporting figures, as is their smaller rival Bear Stearns.Staying with financial services, Standard Life is set to release its prospectus on Thursday after gaining court approval for a planned demutualisation last week. However, some analysts believe that it may have to reduce the price of its float given the current volatility in the markets and the life insurance industry’s recent lacklustre performance. Standard Life initially indicated that it was looking to price its offer between £2.40 and £2.90.Although some companies have pulled their floations in the face of volatile markets, Standard Life is expected to go ahead with its plans.Another big deal preoccupying the market at the moment is the battle for control of the Luxembourg-based steel giant Arcelor. Its board will meet today to consider a revised €25bn (£17bn) bid from the billionaire Lakshmi Mittal’s rival group Mittal, after the two parties met for the first time late last week.

An announcement could come today, though most observers believe tomorrow is more likely.Mittal wants investors to reject Arcelor’s plans to buy Russia’s Severstal, which recently entered the fray as a white knight.Elsewhere, Whitbread, which owns Premier Travel Inns and Costa Coffee, is set to update investors on trading at its annual general meeting on Tuesday. The only division expected to be in positive territory is Premier Travel, which is tipped to be up 5 per cent on a like-for-like basis.Last Friday the group set an end-of-June deadline for the sale of its pubs.While retailers and hospitality groups are expected to benefit greatly from the World Cup, not everyone will share in the spoils. For example, both MyTravel and First Choice Holidays are set to unveil their interim results, but the City will be most interested in how their summer sales are faring – generally the time when travel firms make most of their money.However, some believe that holiday operators will be hit as people choose to stay at home, and in front of their TVs, for the next month.First Choice is tipped to deliver an adjusted pre-tax loss of £80.8m for the first half.Among smaller caps, the property comapny Grainger Trust is expected to provide some insight into the strength of the residential market when it unveils its interim results on Tuesday. Investors will be looking for confirmation that modest growth in the market has continued.Fellow property groups Workspace and London Merchant will provide final results, although in this case their figures will reflect on the non-residential market.Workspace, which rents out office space to 4,000 small and medium-sized businesses, is expected to deliver an adjusted pre-tax profit of £14.7m – slightly up from the £14.5m delivered in the previous year.CALENDARTomorrow 12UK RESULTS: (final) Carclo, Hyder Consulting, IFX, Latchways, London Merchant, Workspace, (interim) CivicaTuesday 13UK RESULTS: (F) CML Microsystems, Oxford Instruments, Patientline, Ten Alps, William Ransom & Son; (I) ATH Resources, Pursuit Dynamics, First Choice Holidays, Grainger TrustWednesday 14UK RESULTS: (F) Accident Exchange, Celsis International, Ensor, London Asia CapitalThursday 15UK RESULTS: (F) Chamberlin & Hill, New Avesco, (I) MyTravel, OMGFriday 16UK RESULTS: None scheduled. The conventional way of backing up large quantities of computer data is to tape it, in much the same way you would have recorded music in days gone by.

Tapes costs a couple of pounds each, but the process is slow and they are vulnerable to damage. Backing up to a hard disk is now a popular alternative since it is quicker and recovering the data is much faster too. But disk systems do have their drawbacks, the most serious being that they are less portable than tapes. If an office is hit by a fire or flood and the server is damaged, it is highly likely the backup disks will be affected too.
Iomega’s REV, a miniature hard drive, aims to combine the portability and flexibility of tape with the speed and robustness of a disk-based system.A single REV drive, at 35 gigabytes, will not back up large servers. So Iomega has combined eight of the drives in its REV Loader 280.

This is a compact box that connects to a server or PC via a USB cable, and can automatically back up data to a total storage capacity of 280GB uncompressed, or 560GB with compression turned on.The REV Loader 280 works with most reasonably recent versions of both the desktop and server versions of Windows. It can be used either as a standalone unit that copies on to multiple REV disks, or as an automated backup system. Iomega supplies a basic version of Computer Associates’ ARCServe software to manage this.The REV Loader 280 can work in a number of ways. A network manager could set the machine up to back up a server to a different REV disk every day, for example, or use multiple disks to capture larger databases or other files.Some of the sophisticated features of ARCServe, like auto- mated backup and archiving of Microsoft Exchange email servers, aren’t included. For these, you’ll have to buy a more advanced version of the software.But for a lot of small firms, the supplied software will be good enough.