The Backup Wrap-Up

Archive is NOT backup, and hopefully this episode will help you understand how/why that is the case. In this continued romp through W. Curtis Preston's Modern Data Protection, we explore the definition of archive, and how different it is from backup. You should have no trouble understanding the difference between the two after listening to this episode. As usual, Mr. Backup fills in the definition...

As we continue our "Backup to Basics" series, we touch on one of the most important questions of all: what is backup and restore? (And how does it different than archive and retrieve?) The answer to these questions are both simple and nuanced. It's important to have a solid understanding of backup and restore in order to understand how archive is different. Reminder: You can download a complimenta...

This episode follows the previous one in a very interesting way. We have a guest, Eric Bursley, whose job is to divine business and technical requirements from a vendor perspective at Presidio, an IT solutions provider. He consults with customers and helps them get from "I want" to "I need." This was a fascinating conversation that took a turn into (surprise) ransomware. Eric is a fan of the pod a...

We say it all the time: your backup requirements must be based on business/organizational needs. If you keep that mind, not only will your organization be better off, it'll be easier to get approval for the new backup system you want. This episode of our Backup to Basics series goes right to that core idea, and we get advice directly from one of our favorite guests: Jeff Rochlin. He is now the Hea...

If you have sometimes wondered if your apps should be in a public cloud, private cloud, or in your own datacenter, have we got the episode for you. And we'll also talk about how to protect those apps regardless of where they reside. We looked hard for an unbiased cloud expert, and I think we hit gold. We found Sagi Brody, the CTO of Opti9, an MSP that supports both public and private clouds, as we...

We get right to the heart of the matter in this next episode of our Backup to Basics series. (See what we did there?). Why do we even back up? It is expensive, time consuming, and no one seems to want to be in charge of it, so we do we even do it anyway. This episode is based on Chapter 1 of W. Curtis Preston's latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection, which you can download for free courtesy...

This week are we pleased to announce we have Joe Dehner, specialist in International Law, to discuss the legal side of e-discovery and all the things that go with it. For the first time on Restore it All, we have a lawyer discussing legal things! (Usually we just tell you we're not lawyers!) My favorite part was listening to him tell stories from actual cases that make the various points we discus...

This is a trend that's happening around the globe, and the news we got from Lloyd's of London Insurance in August is just the latest example. They're looking to exclude payments for "catastropic" and "state-sponsored" attacks. We talk about what that means. We also discuss how a plaintiff lost a recent lawsuit against their insurance company, getting $100K when what they wanted was $600K. It was h...

The Uber attack is huge. The initial penetration teaches about MFA, and how they were able to escalate their privileges from there is simply wrong, wrong, wrong. What can you learn from this? Well, we have a cybersecurity expert, and host of the Tech and Main podcast, on the pod this week to help us figure that out. We had planned to just talk about the Uber attack, but he also wanted to talk abou...

Cyber security attacks are everywhere, and they're definitely going after what you have running in your favorite hyperscaler. Today we are joined by Paul Hadgy, CEO of Horangi Security, a cyber security company specializing in securing your cloud infrastructure. We talk about a number of things, but at one point, Mr. Backup asked him what the thought was the five biggest security mistakes people m...

Jira is yet another service that could be at the center of your organization, and losing the data stored in there could cost you a lot. Did you know it doesn't even have an audit trail for many things? Not only can you lose data, you might not know what was deleted or who did it! We are joined this week from two representatives from Revyz, a new service to back up Jira. They talk about what to bac...

If you don't meet your company's Recovery time objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective with your backup design, nothing else matters. Seriously. No one cares if you can back up – only that you can restore in a timeframe they consider reasonable. The only way that's going to happen is if you agree to these times UPFRONT. In this episode in our new back to basics series, we'll jump right into t...

Why don't you have a password manager already? Our guest this week, Chris Hayner, blogger at hayner.net and host of the Chaos Lever podcast, wrote a great blog called Yes, you need a password manager. "Yes, You Do Need A Password Manager, Brett. Yes You Do!" Both Prasanna and Curtis DO have password managers, so he's preaching to the choir. But if you'd like to hear the argument for why you need o...

Datacore has been one of the storage industry's best-kept secrets for a long time, quietly growing a dedicated customer base in Fort Lauderdale. Their CEO, Dave Zabrowski, joins us on this episode to explain their background, and tells us about how their technology and some savvy business decisions resulted in them owning Open EBS, the most popular container-attached storage platform. Datacore is...

This week we have Barry Lunt, one of two founders of Milleniata, the creators of M-Disc. The company may be gone, but the format lives on. Most modern DVD and Blu-Ray drives can write to M-Disc, and Verbatim still sells it. Barry explains to us why they decided to make M-Disc, and why it's different than any other optical product. He also offers a shocker: a study done many years ago that shows th...

Druva's new data resiliency guarantee covers more than any other guarantee in the data protection/data resilience segment. It also was written with no silly exclusions (like some other guarantees) that are simply there to keep from having to pay anyone. It requires only a certain service level and that the customer follows Druva's best practices. It protects against the five areas of risk, includi...

Warshipping is yet another way hackers are taking advantage of how the pandemic has changed the workplace. Did you know you could be hacked by UPS, Fedex, or the postal service? Warshipping is shipping a self-powered device in a package so that it arrives at your office and is left unattended. (It's sent to someone working from home.) The device then sits there, sniffing the wifi, and eventually c...

If you're one of those people that look at typical storage offerings for backup and recovery and say, "I can't afford this," you're not alone. A lot of ready-to-go storage solutions can get very expensive very quickly. Our guest this week (Erik Ableson from Infrageeks.com ) ran into this a lot with his small-government customers and SMBs in France, and knew he had to get creative. He wanted to bui...

Hammerspace offers a global filesystem that creates a single namespace across multiple storage systems and cloud storage providers. Hammerspace's name is inspired by the name for the magical place that cartoon characters get them from (e.g. Bugs Bunny pulling a huge hammer out of his pocket). They've taken a different approach to a global filesystem, using metadata to significantly minimize actual...

2022 is a new world in the cyber attack space, and Katie Nickels, SANS instructor, and director of intelligence at threat detection vendor Red Canary, describes the top five new attack they are seeing in the space. Spoiler alert: one of them is attacks against backups! Learn from an expert as we discuss the top five attacks they are seeing right now. We talk about living off the cloud, MFA exploit...

This week we talk about this exciting "new" medium for archiving data that is especially attractive to SMBs and home users. It's an optical disc that looks like a DVD and is readable in all Blu-Ray drives, but underneath it's something very different. If you haven't heard of it, then you're in luck! Thanks to Daniel Rosehill, backup anorak and friend of the show, we're going to talk about it – and...

Someone that knew Bill Gates when he was a boy in on the podcast this week, although we only talk about Bill Gates for a moment. He has 30+ years in backup experience and tells us what it's been like to adapt to all of the backup changes over the years. His first backup was to punch cards and punch tape, and he was in the same Boy Scout troop as Bill Gates. Fans of the podcast know his name alread...

Today we are joined by security expert and host of the Secure Talk podcast , Mark Shriner, to discuss information security. (Make sure to check out his podcast here: http://www.securetalkpodcast.com/) We talk about it from a personal perspective, as well as for organizations. Mark, Curtis, and Prasanna talk about what are the bare minimum things you should be doing as an individual to protect your...

So many people are surprised when their restore is slower than their backup. You shouldn't be, as it's quite common. The good news is there are things you can do to make it faster – if you know them in advance. W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Prasanna Malaiyandi tackle the seven reasons why your restore may be slower than your backup. Topics covered include RAID penalties, tape issues, database...

Pat Mayock is a Data Protection Warrior for HPE, and he helped us to understand where he thinks LTO & RDX (a removable disk technology) sit in the market. He explains how much tape is used today in enterprise and cloud environments, especially in the public cloud that so many think is a tapeless world. He says the cloud vendors are some of LTO's biggest customers! We talk about what LTO is goo...