Could this Be a Low-Cost, Idiotproof Harvest Tool?

I swear I read more in Law Technology News than just my own column, but I confess that sometimes I move, er, um, a tad more briskly through the product announcements than the articles.  I need to stop that because, leafing through the October 2008 issue, a gadget caught my eye on p. 16 that offered a glimmer of promise as a cool tool for desk side collection of ESI.

It's called a Clickfree Automatic Backup from a Canadian concern called Storage Appliance Corporation.  In one sense, it's just a small external hard drive of unimposing capacity (160GB) and price ($160 US), but what captured my imagination was the claim that, without running any software, you could set it to scour the local hard drives of a machine to capture files with any extension you choose. 

It occurred to me that you could, e.g., set this gadget to search for Outlook .PST and .OST e-mail container files by whatever name they've been assigned and wherever they reside on a drive, then ship it to a custodian to connect via USB.  It launches spontaneously and grabs the e-mail containers without relying on anyone to rifle through all the folders and subfolders to find and copy them.  The custodian ships it back, and the data can be searched, sliced and diced at the firm or vendor.

There are certainly other ways to accomplish the same thing over a high speed network or desk side with conventional tools, and I haven't seen or used one of these Clickit devices, nor do I know anyone who has.  But, as we scrabble around for EDD tools that are sufficiently low-cost and low-tech to be of use in smaller cases, maybe there's a place for something like this or its progeny.