This post is part of an ongoing effort to identify the people, places, ideas, products and companies that are poised to become central to the global conversation over the next six to nine months. Click here to nominate your own “name.” The best will be featured in an upcoming issue of Forbes magazine.
More and more non-techie home computer users are becoming comfortable with the notion of drawing resources from "the cloud," the flip phrase for a giant off-premises server accessed over the Internet. But since computer hard-drive glitches remain as common as ever, that likely will prove to be a boom for a small but growing company called Backblaze.
Image via CrunchBase
For $50 a year prepaid, the Silicon Valley-based firm automatically will back up all hard drives on a computer, even external ones plugged into the box. About all the computer user has to do is sign up for the service and slap down a credit card. Backblaze pretty much will do the rest in the background whenever it has Internet access to the computer and it's turned on.
Backblaze is hardly the only entry in the cloud-based back-up niche. But it's been drawing notice and rave reviews from the technical press for its low cost, effectiveness and utter simplicity. Backblaze is certainly a lot easier than culling through a computer every so often and burning backups on a plethora of CDs and DVDs, or using a thumb drive. Unlike humans, Backblaze doesn't forget to do this. A lot safer, too, since a backup disk or drive sitting next to the computer could go up in the same house fire.
Plus one big side benefit. As Forbes reported in March, the always-backing-up-when-connected feature allowed a Massachusetts college student to recover his laptop computer, which had been stolen from a dorm lounge. The thief didn't turn off the Backblaze automatic background backup service. That enabled the owner to identify and even publicly shame him by posting a video on YouTube that had been backed up of the thief dancing in what looks like his kitchen. Headline: "Don't steal computers belonging to people who know how to use computers."
At last look, the video had been seen more than 1.5 million times by viewers who knew the Backblaze back story. Now that's buzz.
Follow the work of William P. Barrett on Twitter by clicking here.
