A Smaller Backup Vendor With Advantages Over GiantsA Smaller Backup Vendor With Advantages Over Giants

Having an IT staff remains a luxury for most companies, so a smaller firm's de facto IT administrator fantasizes about easy-to-use, easily integrated products.

TimeSpring Software Corp. seems to have identified the seat-of-the-pants crowd with its backup-and-recovery products. Tuesday, the vendor unveiled its TimeData file-based, continuous backup-and-recovery software. TimeSpring focuses on the Windows platform.

TimeData will run on any Windows server, and it's priced at $1,295 per server. Because it is file-aware, TimeData can retrieve information quicker and easier than other backup-and-recovery products that require conversion complexity and time to move information between servers and storage systems. The product can be used to roll back to any time of day and never has to retrieve entire volumes of data because it tracks changes continuously.

TimeSpring has an advantage over bigger vendors like Computer Associates, Veritas, and even Microsoft, which recently got into backup and recovery, says Arun Taneja, founder of industry analysis firm Taneja Group.

"Microsoft takes snapshots, so it's not continuous, and it's at a block level that must be converted into a file format," Taneja says. "And TimeSpring rolls back to any time, while Microsoft only goes back as far as the last snapshot."