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GoVault – It's The Software, Stupid

Simplicity is the key to products for the SOHO market. Small business owners are like one-armed paperhangers; accounting, technology, and other administration tasks will always take second place to doing enough business to make next week's payroll. The backup software bundled with Quantum's GoVault uses this year's hot technology, data deduplication, to make backup to GoVault's removable hard drive cartridges simple as any I've seen. All you have to do is pick the folders to backup and set a schedule. The rest of the thinking is done for you.

A few years ago vendors ,including Quantum (GoVault), Imation (Odyssey and Ulysses), and ProStor (RDX) all released removable hard drive systems targeting the backup market. They all packaged 2.5-inch hard drives in shock-mounted cartridges that clearly had a lot more engineering behind them than the plastic hard drive sleds I buy from NewEgg for $20 so I can change lab systems personalities in a flash.

Some flopped, like Imation's Ulysses, which was intended to replace tapes and tape drives in tape libraries, bringing a whole new meaning to Virtual Tape Library. Others have seen it hard to find a market that's willing to pay a premium for a nice sturdy cartridge when USB hard drives are a dime a dozen.

Quantum's solution is to deliver cool, easy-to-use software. The first time a backup job is run against a new cartridge, it does a full backup. Since the software does subfile data deduplication, subsequent backups always are going to backup just the data that's changed since the last backup, relieving the poor SOHO user from having to choose between full, incremental, and differential backups.

For $750, a SOHO user could get started with the dock (Internal IDE or USB) and 2 160-GB cartridges so it could start a simple on-site/off-site rotation. At $300 a throw, GoVault cartridges cost almost three times the cost of USB hard drives, but with deduplication will hold a lot more.

It's not the right solution for backing up your media collection, but looks like a good solution for the SOHO user that needs a brainless backup of its accounting and CRM data.

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