SmallNetBuilder

Installation

HP has made the setup and installation of the Media Vault a fairly painless procedure.  A large (16” X 33”) two-sided setup poster guides you through the process.  The poster tells you what’s in the box, shows you how to connect the power and network cables, instructs you to run the installation software and illustrates each of the major features of the Media Vault. 

The installation wizard installs the HP update program, any missing components of Microsoft .NET 2.0, the HP Media Vault Pro control center and backup software from NTI (more on backup later.) 

The setup poster instructs you to place your firewall software in “learn” mode, as a number of programs need to access the network.  That’s good advice, as on several of my computers, each running a different firewall, I allowed access to all of the programs being installed. Yet the first time through, neither computer could find the Media Vault on my network.  But the second time I tried, the Media Vault was found by both systems.  Of course, by that time, I already had learned the IP address of the media vault from Network Magic running on one of my systems, and had logged into the management console.

Features

Once the installation is complete, you launch the HP Control Center (Figure 4) from an icon in the System Tray. 

Figure 4: HP Media Vault Pro Control Center

The Center has four tabs across the bottom.  As you select a tab, options for that tab will appear in the top portion of the screen.  For the “Main” tab each of the options above will take you to the root of one of the pre-defined shares on the Media Vault.  Clicking on HP Media Vault icon will show you all of the shares on the device.

Figure 5: Media Vault Control Center Backup

The Media Vault provides four ways to back up your data (Figure 5).  First, it ships with OEM versions of NTI’s Drive Shadow (Version 3) and NTI’s DriveBackup 4.  (The non-pro mv2120 does not include Drive Backup.)

Drive Shadow (Figure 6) lets you create simple backup jobs for popular file types (Music, video, photos, documents and your desktop) or create custom jobs that include specific directories.  You can also specify how frequently to backup and the number of file revisions (none, all or user specified) to keep.  As you create the job, you select a volume/directory on the Media Vault as the backup target destination.  My test jobs ran as expected.

Figure 6: Drive Shadow custom backup job summary