Yo Decho

In my spare time (when I’m not busy blogging ;-), I am hanging out these days at Decho Corporation.  The name is short for “digital echo”, which is meant to evoke that valuable and ever-growing body of personal, digital information we all accumulate and have reverberating through our lives (photos, documents, financial records, contacts, correspondence, professional portfolios, etc.).

Today’s ad hoc approach to keeping track of our digital stuff is simply collapsing under the sheer weight of the task as our information legacy grows in size, duration and value, and our lives are increasingly scattered (in a good way) across multiple devices and services.  This new company is a combination of two cloud-based application companies — Mozy, Inc. and Pi Corp. — that have teamed up to help you protect, manage and enrich your digital echo. 

Amongst other things, we’re the proud purveyors of the Mozy online backup service.  With online backup, there really is no excuse for not backing up your vital information — it is simple, automatic, secure and your data is protected at a remote location (we also hope someday to make flossing your teeth this easy).

Unfortunately, the risk of data loss is all too real.  Most of us have experienced it in some form.  Hard drives crash. PCs fail and get lost or stolen.  Viruses attack.  And even if you are diligent about backups, disasters can take out both your PC and local backups.  And that’s just common risks.  We hear all kinds of scary (yet real) stories that either make people glad they had Mozy or convert them into online backup users.

Mozy has almost a million users, supports both Mac OS X and Windows and safeguards over 10 petabytes of user data (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).  Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal said “I prefer Mozy” when it comes to online backup.  There is even a free version that will protect up to 2 gigabytes – so give it a try.

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We’ve started a campaign to warn people about some of the less common threats to their most precious information:

(In the event you’re not a connoisseur of microwave dinners and therefore don’t face this risk, here are some more videos that highlight other risks to be wary of).

In addition to doing esoteric risk assessment, I have been immersed in the world of services operating at multi-petabyte scale.  It is a lot of fun to be groping around in the pre-dawn darkness of the industry frontier.  Hopefully I’ll weave some of this learning into the blog going forward.