Storage Appliance Corp., a Richmond Hill, Ont.-based vendor of personal storage devices that feature automatic backup capabilities, is expanding its product offerings with the addition of its Clickfree Portable Backup HD801 solution.
The new Clickfree Portable Backup HD801 product is an external hard drive turn-key solution that automatically backs up everything on the PC. Bryan McLeod, CEO of Storage Appliance, says Clickfree solutions are different from other backup solutions because Clickfree products are ones that work straight out of the box.
“Most products require you to install software and configure it before you can do anything else,” McLeod said. “Even though these solutions may promote automatic backup, they’re only automatic after you’ve set everything up. Our product is really the only automatic solution that automatically grabs everything and backs it up.”
McLeod said Storage Appliance, which has been around for the past three years, is working to spread awareness and educate customers about automatic backup solutions.
“People don’t realize the hard drive on their computer will fail at some point in time and all of their e-mails, photos music and so on will be lost,” McLeod said. “Everyone’s gathering more and more content all the time and people don’t realize that there’s a solution that could be truly automatic.”
The Clickfree Portable Backup products come in both the HD801 and HD701 models, where HD801 is a 160GB hard drive and the HD701 is 120GB. To save digital content, end-users only need to connect the HD801 device to the computer using a USB cable. Once connected, the product will automatically start searching, organizing and backing up all of the digital files and data that’s stored on the PC. To give an idea as to how much digital content can be stored using the HD801 160GB hard drive, McLeod says end-users can back up 320,000 documents, 70,000 photos and 320,000 documents.
Also already in the Clickfree family of products are Storage Appliance’s Photo DVD Backup, Music DVD Backup and its Office DVD Backup products.
Right now, the solution only works on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista-compatible machines. By the end of this year though, McLeod said the backup appliance will also be compatible with Macs.
“We’re trying to create a new category in stores where backup is being aimed at consumers in retail,” McLeod said. “We try to pitch the automatic backup solution story to consumers. The target audience (is the) mass market, (for) anyone who owns a computer, takes digital photos or video, collects digital music and/or any other types of digital files including e-mail.”
While Storage Appliance has a few distributors such as Bell Microproducts Canada, GB Micro and others distributing its products across the country, McLeod said the company is always looking for new partners.
“We’re always looking for new partners in new non-traditional channels (such as) grocery, department (stores, etc) and in traditional channels. Ideal partners (should) have an established reputation in their respective category and (should be) open to the challenge of building out a new category of automatic backup that would appeal to the masses.”
Storage Appliance’s HD801 retails for $159.99 and is available beginning next Tuesday through retailers such as Blacks, Henrys Camera, London Drugs, Office Depot, Staples Canada, and many others.
