The Backup Wrap-Up

Ever had questions about SQL Server, Azure, SQL Server ON Azure, how to backup SQL Server, or how to backup Azure? This is the episode for you. Denny Cherry, a SQL Server and Azure specialist and author of seven books, talks to us about both of these technologies. Before talking about anything important, we tackle the mystery of how you pronounce Azure. Surprise! I was pronouncing it wrong, accord...

Mark Lantz, Manager CloudFPGA and Tape Technologies for IBM, joins us on this week’s podcast to talk about how he feels that tape still has a future in data storage. We talk about past and future advancements in the substrates tape uses, as well as how tape has not approached the superparamagnetic limit, the way we have with disk. (This is the limit at which you cannot increase the storage capacit...

Every wondered what you're supposed to do with all your old backups, now that you've moved on to another backup product? Simon Brown from StoneRam believes he has the answer to this problem that has plagued backup customers (and vendors) for ages. He's able to transfer backup data out of common backup formats and into your new product, or restore backups from your old product without having to mai...

After the recent stories about Veeam customers being directly targeted by the Conti ransomware group, we invited Rick Vanover and Dave Russell from Veeam to discuss the topic on the podcast. The stories in the press seemed to focus on the attack, as well as how ruthless the Conti ransomware gang tends to be. We thought we'd give Veeam a chance to explain exactly what Veeam customers can do to prot...

This week we are joined by Greg Edwards, CEO and founder of CryptoStopper, to discuss once again the important topic of ransomware. We talk about the challenges typically experienced by ransomware victims, especially exfiltration and potential exposure of sensitive data. The only way to stop that particular attack is stop the data from being exfiltrated in the first place. CryptoStopper has a way...

This one will get you talking! Jody Bruchon, author of “ZFS won’t save you: fancy filesystem fanatics need to get a clue about bit rot (and RAID-5),”, joins us on the podcast. The blog post went viral, resulting in three times as many words in the comments as the original article had. We start with an explanation of bit rot, why it happens, and why ZFS won’t be able to fix all bit rot. (For more i...

Inspired by the article "How good is your backup, really?" by Sandra Vogel, we discuss how to evaluate and potentially redesign your backup system. We talk about different kinds of backup systems, and how that impacts how you evaluate them. We also talk about how important it is these days to ensure that your backups are impervious to ransomware. We also talk about the importance of including reco...

We talk to Celeste Kinswood from Druva about cyber resilience, and specifically ransomware attacks that have long dwell times – which is most of them. The median dwell time (the time between infection and you finding out you have ransomware) is 23 days, and the average is around 90. It's encrypting files during that entire time, and responding to that is beyond difficult. Celeste talks about a nov...

We review and discuss Mark Dargin's Network World article "Credible threat: how to protect networks from ransomware." His article lays out several steps, each of which we discuss and expand upon: train your people, update your servers and apps, antivirus tools on endpointsm backup your data (of course), test your backups, and conduct vulnerability assessments (Pen tests). Read the original article...

We all know how important it is to verify your backups. But many companies simply lack the technical ability or time to do such a thing. Chris Marshall's company, VerifiedBackups.com to the rescue. They have a service that is aimed at companies with under 100 GB of SQL data. and will do an end-to-end verification of your SQL backups, guaranteeing that they are recoverable and safely stored offsite...

Brian Greenberg and Cameron Laghaeian argue the point that individually encrypting each entity in a database storing personal information is the only true way to stop ransomware attacks that have exfiltrated data and threaten to release it. While Mr. Backup likes the idea, there was a pretty heated discussion on this episode, because he believes that doing this will roll back all advancements in b...

In this privacy-themed podcast, we start with Apple's bombshell of a new feature, where they are scanning your pictures to see if you have any child porn on your Apple devices. While stopping child porn is a laudable goal, we discuss the privacy ramifications of this feature. We also discuss how Apple's iCloud backups aren't encrypted! The next topic is Luxembourg's huge $900M GDPR fine levied aga...

Dave Lukens from Cockroach Labs joins us to discuss CochroachDB, a highly resilient SQL ACID-compliant database. We discuss the CAP theorum, which says you can choose any two from Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance – but you can't have all three. We talk about which two they chose, and why they believe they're the most resilient SQL database. We also, of course, discuss how yo...

In this bonus episode of Restore it All, Mr. Backup talks BBQ! A few months ago, Curtis did a 15-stop BBQ tour of Texas, and made a series of youtube videos (https://www.youtube.com/wcpreston) about it. This is a bonus episode where Prasanna interviews him about his experience. If you have no interest in BBQ or beef, you can skip this one. Our regular episode will go live next Monday.

Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU, joins Mr. Backup and Prasanna Malaiyandi on the podcast to explain the evolution of the HYCU product line. They have expanded well beyond their original product that was aimed at Nutanix AHV. In addition to VMware, they've added support for Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Kubernetes, and Microsoft 365. They are also clearly focused on delivering their offeri...

Mr. Backup and Prasanna grill George Crump, CMO of StorOne, a software-defined storage company, about their product. We start with an overview, alon with George's claims about not needing backup... .then we challenge him on that topic. George used to be Curtis' boss, so this one's a fun one.

We are super excited to have the Emmy Winning sound mixer Larry Blake on the podcast to talk about his upcoming book "Solving The Digital Dilemma." It is a response to "The Digital Dilemma," which is a paper released in 2007 by the Academy's Sci-Tech Council that discusses long term archiving of a movie. (It describes a very NON-digital solution.) He has edited the sound on over 60 motion pictures...

Wolfgang Goerlich, Advisory CISO, explains the current state of information security, and why he thinks many environments are focusing on the wrong things. We speak about ransomware, extortionware, and phishing, even giving examples where we know we have personally been phished! He explains how this illustrates his point that we need more emphasis in different areas of information security.

Mr. Backup and Prasanna discuss the Kaseya attack that happened over the July 4th weekend of 2021. First, we talk about how bad actors use long weekends for attacks, then discuss various things you can/should do to ensure that your environment would not be vulnerable to such an attack. We talk about the kinds of questions that even an unskilled person can ask to help mitigate this risk, including...

Joe Jurneke has been designing the innards of magnetic devices since 1973, and now he's here to answer our questions. He started with disk, and moved over to tape over thirty years ago, and is now retired – but consults with the tape industry from time to time. We talk in detail about how tape drives work they way they do, their reliability and more. We take down a couple of myths from the guy tha...

We cover my latest book, Modern Data Protection, by O'Reilly & Associates on this podcast. I give an overview of the book, which covers the "Why, What, Where, and How" of backup, archive, and disaster recovery. After giving an overview of the book, I talk about why I wrote, and what it's like to write a book for O'Reilly. Prasanna acted as a tech editor on the book, so he offered his unique pe...

Prasanna and Curtis discuss whether or not can (or will) OVH properly redesign their backup infrastructure to prevent another incident like what happened in March, where many customers lost their sites forever. As we discussed in our previous podcast, OVH had a backup service already that people paid for, and it was not up to the task. OVH"s CEO made an 8-minute video where he discussed some of th...

We talk to Mike Johnson of ComplyTrust, who says they "remember those you are supposed to forget." We talk about the data management challenges created by data subject access requests (DSARs), right-of-erasure (ROE, AKA right to be forgotten, or RTBF) requests, and the fact that we have many parts of the datacenter that are much better at remembering than forgetting. Backups are a particular chall...

This week we discuss further lessons from the OVH fire, which starts with an admission by the CEO that some customers who paid for the backup service lost their backups in the fire. It then morphs into a discussion about designing resilient systems, starting with the concept of designing for failure. You have to protect against both physical and logical damage to your apps and data. We talk about...

This week we discuss a topic brought up by the OVH fire. It appears some people actually had a contractual backup service that wasn't doing it's job. How do you verify that a service you're paying for is real, and is doing what it claims to be doing? Especially how do you make sure they are storing data offsite? We've got some ideas.