The Backup Wrap-Up

Lindsey Schulz MD/MPH joins once more on the podcast to discuss the great news we have had in the last few weeks around the Coronavirus (COVID-19). There are THREE vaccines that have been announced that all exceed the goals the medical community set, and will all be applying for emergency use authorization from the FDA. She explains the pros and cons of each of the three vaccinees we know about at...

Lindsey Schulz MD/MPH visits us again to give us an update on the current state of COVID-19. There is good and bad news, here, as we are in the midst of a third wave of cases and deaths. But the good news is that health care professionals have learned a lot about the virus in the last several months that have helped to reduce the death rate somewhat, and improve quality of life for those suffering...

In a departure from our normal coverage, I decided to bring on Mark Thompson, who was the Site Manager for the election polling site I volunteered at last week. He gives us insight into how elections are managed in the US, and what we do to prevent fraud and ensure the overall integrity of the system. We talk about the technology used on the front end of the polling process, which in San Diego cou...

Prasanna and Curtis talk about two recent ransomware attacks on hospitals and what we can learn from them. They also discuss things you can do to protect yourself from such attacks, and how to prepare to respond if you get one. We especially talk about the 3-2-1 rule and the remote desktop protocol (RDP) and how these figure into protecting yourself from such things.

This isn't a rebuttal to last week's podcast, but it might seem that way. Last week we talked about the advantages of tape for very long term retention (e.g. 10 years), one of which is a significant cost advantage. This week we will discuss how backup, recovery, and disaster recovery are very different use cases, and why disk and cloud is a much more appropriate place for that use case. Joining us...

Matt Starr, CTO of Spectra, comes on the podcast to discuss the advantages of tape for long term storage. We talk about how tape is actually better at holding data long term than disk is – 10,000 times better if you compare it to SATA disk. We also talk about the advancements in tape in the last 10-20 years that have made libraries like Spectra's even more reliable than they used to be. Finally, w...

Daniel Rosehill, a self-described "backup anorak," joins us to discuss how difficult it can be to backup consumer SaaS services, such as Evernote. Daniel used to use EverNote on Linux, and sent a message to their support system on how to backup its data. They had no answer unless you were using it on Windows. We talk about Google Drive, Dropbox, and other consumer-grade cloud services, and how the...

The Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat hunting team found that a big customer of theirs had misconfigured two critical Amazon Web Services (AWS) services. If these misconfigurations were exploited by hackers, it could have created a data breach that could have cost the customers tens of millions of dollars. Prasanna Malaiyandi and W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) discuss this misconfiguration, and w...

A mystery guest from a multinational corporation that experienced a disaster during a recent hurricane describes their mostly-disk NetBackup environment and how they used it to recover from a hurricane that ravaged an island. (Company and location names are changed or not mentioned so "Harry Potter," our mystery guest, can speak freely.)

Shalabh Goyal(@goyalshalabh) joins us on this podcast to discuss sharded databases – and MongoDB and Cassandra in particular – and how one might go about backing them up. Suffice it to say that it is complicated. We learned a lot from recording this podcast and you will learn a lot listening to it!

Tony McGarry, Senior Principal Engineer at Druva, joins W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi to talk about backing up large, multi-node, sharded NoSQL databases like DynamoDB, Cassandra, and MongoDB.

Adam Fisher (@BonzoVT), Cloud & DevOps Engineer at RoundTower Technologies, visits the podcast to talk about VMware Cloud on AWS (AKA VMC), and what it's like to actually use and administer it in a production environment. We also talk about how people backup VMC.

Carol Nichols and Jake Goulding, the authors of the Rust in Motion video series, join us to talk about Rust and why it makes such a "safe" programming language. We discuss what it means to be a safe programming language and how Rust accomplishes that. We also discuss the upcoming free Live@Manning Rust Conference. Finding Rustaceans weird but intriguing? Secretly wanting to become one? Tune-in, Se...

Gina Rosenthal (@gminks) joins us on this week's podcast to talk about the edge, Kubernetes, and how to protect it all. Good conversation that also includes som Texas Brisket talk! We also mention the Women in Tech conference that will go live on October 13. Here's what they have to say about themselves: When the girls get coding!. Join us on your screens, Oct 13, for the live@Manning “Women in Te...

Prasanna and Curtis discuss their opinion of an ITPro article called Nine Tips to Improve your Disaster Recovery Strategy. In case you're curious, they are: 1. Have full documentation 2. Assess the risks 3. Drill for disaster 4. Prepare for disasters of different levels 5. Consider the cloud 6. Prioritize resilience 7. Evaluate security practices 8. Revise and Revisit 9. Build a critical response...

Scott Lowe (@otherscottlowe) joins us on the podcast to discuss the recent major hack of Twitter, where hundreds of accounts were compromised using backdoor access gained via a Twitter employee.

W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi discuss the pros and cons of the various ways to backup a NAS filer.

Curtis and Prasanna discuss the very difficult problem of "forgetting" someone using a backup system that is fundamentally designed to remember. This is a direct conflict between GDPR/CCPA and backup.

Antone Kom, 7X Certified Salesforce expert, explains to W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi all the things that can go wrong when you don't backup your Salesforce database.

Chris Evans (@chrismevans) discusses with us the idea of cloud "snapshots" (which are actually image copies & very different than array snapshots) and the pros and cons of using them for backup & recovery – as well as other purposes.

We are joined by Jake Burns, who is an industry veteran and an AWS and Druva customer before he became an AWS employee. He is now Enterprise Strategist at AWS and shares with us how LIveNation moved their entire corporate infrastructure to the cloud in one year, and how he now supports AWS customers in their cloud journey.

On this special US Independence Day edition, we talk a little bit about history in general, and how we all owe those who came before us. Then we morph that discussion into one about backups, and how we must also remember the backup lessons of the past. W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston) then tells old backup stories.

Zoë Rose, a cyber investigator from the UK, joins us to talk about the lessons we can learn from the ransomware attack on Honda. We discuss a number of "common sense" things a company can do to protect their data.

GigagOm analyst Enrico Signoretti (@esignoretti) is our guest this week, and he helps us understand their latest radar report, which evaluates data management vendors.

On this first anniversary special, we are joined by my daughter, the voice behind our podcast's theme song. Fun times talking to her, and talking about our dreams for next year's broadcast.