The Backup Wrap-Up

This whole episode is a Mr. Backup rant, where he talks about things that people should really stop doing with their backup systems, starting with backing up directly to tape. There is a place for tape, but it is NOT at the front end of the backup system. Curtis and Prasanna passionately discuss and explain several relics of the ways we used to do things, and why they no longer make sense. Another...

This week we are joined by emergency preparedness expert and prolific author and speaker, Virginia Nicols, webmaster of EmergencyPlanGuide.org. We talk about why and how to prepare for a disaster/emergency in your personal life, as well as how to do it for a small business. This is a bit different than our usual episode, as there is very little talk about backup and recovery. We talk about where t...

If you liked last week's episode where we talked about this "so let's talk about ransomware" series on reddit, you'll love this week. We have the author, Snorkel42, to talk about the origins behind the security cadence series, and why he decided to finally write some on ransomware. (He explains that everything he talks about his ransomware, but he admits he's been "Mr. Myagi'ing" it for a while.)....

This week, Prasanna and Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) review a series of posts made by Snorkel42, who previously appeared on this podcast in the episode called "Security expert rips Okta for their response to hack." Things were recorded out of order, so this is the episode where we discovered him on Reddit, and tried our best to distill several thousand words into about 30 mins of advice on how t...

Vast is a massively-scalable storage system designed around multiple pieces of technology that weren't available just a few years ago (e.g. NVMe, Storage class memory, QLC) that offers both file and object functionality, immutable snapshots, and integration with the cloud to address the "smoking hole" problem. Their typical sale (of which they've made many) is north of $1 million, and they have ma...

This episode is a unique look inside the Conti ransomware group, courtesy of a four-part series from Krebs on Security. We review the interesting takeaways from Brian Kreb's series of over 12,000-words from quite a bit of research. The series was inspired by a hack of Conti that resulted in a traunch of internal documents being made public. This gives a unique view into how the organization thinks...

This week we are joined by John "Ricky" Martin, Director of Strategy at NetApp (and former owner of a tape recovery business), to talk about his paper that declares that backup is fundamentally evil and done in an unintelligent way. Mr. Backup wasn't sure how this one was going to go, and there were at least one or two arguments along the way. No blows were thrown, though. We definitely talk about...

We have none other than Snorkel42 from Reddit on the podcast today. He has 20 years experience in InfoSec, and is a prolific writer on Reddit under the handle Snorkel42. (Check out his posts here: https://www.reddit.com/user/snorkel42/). (We will not be using his given name during the recording.). He thinks Okta managed to turn a mole hill into a mountain by incorrectly handling the hack that happ...

Gary Williams tells a great story about earlier in his career that taught him the value of testing backups and updating documentation. He explains how he thought his backups were fine, until a "new guy" came onto the scene and dared to ask the question, "When was the last time you tested your backups?" As Gary explains, sometimes new people have the best perspective. They let him do the first test...

When you back up your SaaS apps (because you know you are supposed to), should you back them up to a SaaS service or on on-premises backup system? After defining what SaaS is and isn't, Prasanna and Curtis discuss this important question. First they look at how sizing a SaaS system for backup is different than when you do it in a datacenter, and how that creates challenges for backup design. Does...

Learn from others' mistakes by reviewing last year's worst ransomware attacks with Mr. Backup and Prasanna Malaiyandi. Listen to them review the 10 worst attacks from 2021, then discuss lessons learned: Colonial Pipeline, BrennTag, Acer, JBS, Quanta, NBA,AXA, CNA, CD Projekt, and Kaseya. Then they discuss the trends they see, and the lessons we can all learn from these horrible attacks.

W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Prasanna Malaiyandi weigh in on a reddit thread that started with a simple question from a user. He has MSPs trying to sell him a solution to back up Microsoft 365, and he's wondering if that's even necessary. As usual on reddit, there are many opinions. Mr. Backup debates the various points being made by the anit-backup crowd, including an article arguing the sa...

On this week's episode of Backup Central's Restore it All, Mr. Backup himself becomes the guest, while Prasanna Malaiyandi takes over as host. W. Curtis Preston explains the backup configuration of the website behind the Restore it All podcast, and how bit rot caused him to have to restore part of it. We talk about bit rot, the 3-2-1 rule, off-site backups, backups stored in S3 and Google Drive, a...

This is a response to Tom Hollingsworth's (@networkingnerd) video "Disaster Recovery is a Security Function," found here: https://gestaltit.com/tomversations/tom/disaster-recovery-is-a-security-function-tomversations-episode-25/. I respectfully disagree w/Tom's assertions in his video, and decided to use this as the first episode I'm going to publish a video version of. You can listen to the podca...

This week's episode is about an incident that happened at the University of Kyoto, Japan, where they lost 77 TB of research data forever. What can we learn from what happened to them? First we discuss the concept of "we can't afford backup," that seems to be prevalent in a lot of universities and research institutions. We then ask and answer the question of whether or not it is every OK to not bac...

Vinicius "Vinny" Grippa, the co-author of O'Reilly's Learning MySQL (now in its second edition) talks MySQL and MongoDB, as well as that all-important topic of how to back them up! We first learn a little bit about Percona, where Vinny works, as they consult in the database space. We then discussed a hot topic from Curtis, which is this idea of companies that say they don't want an IT department....

This week we celebrate Data Privacy Day, which is an international event that occurs every year on 28 January. According to its website, "The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. It is currently observed in the United States, Canada, Nigeria, Israel and 47 European countries." Prasanna and Curtis discuss the latest in privacy pra...

Things got a little tense on this week's podcast when James Strong (@strongjz, Co-Author of O'Reilly's Networking & Kubernetes) hinted at DR being a thing of the past with K8s. Mr. Backups was having none of that. No blows were thrown, mostly because it was all online, but it was a really good conversation that K8s and DR enthusiasts alike will find interesting. We also cover the new book, Net...

Bob Plankers, resiliency specialist from VMware, joins us on this week's podcast, as we examine last year's major Facebook outage that took out Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all at once. We discuss what we believe happened, just how bad it got, and our thoughts as to what we can learn from this huge outage. This isn't schadenfreude, and we acknowledge that we are Monday morning quarterbacking....

On this first business day of 2022, let’s take a look back at the year that was. It was, of course, another year of COVID. In fact, Curtis contracted COVID right at the end, despite being boosted. This is also the year of the OVH fire that we talked about for three episodes: https://www.backupcentral.com/datacenter-manager-dan-frith-discusses-the-ovh-fire-restore-it-all-podcast-105/ https://www.ba...

This week’s guest tells the most incredible story we’ve ever had on the podcast. We’ve had ransomware restores, disaster recoveries after a hurricane, but we’ve never had someone who deleted their entire computing environment and then restored it using their backups. (Backups that had never been tested to this degree, BTW.) Paul VanDyke is the IT Supervisor at the Kodiak Island Borough in Alaska,...

The founder of rsync.net, John Kozubik, joins us on the podcast this week. It's a unique offering: a ZFS filesystem running in a private cloud – accessible only via SSH – that is designed just for sending your backup data to. They support anything that can run over SSH. Use rsync, scp, etc. to copy your data unencrypted, or something like restic, duplicity, or borg, if you want your backups to be...

This week, we talk to Nick Craigwood, the creator and principal developer of rclone, a very popular open-source tool for copying data to and from cloud providers. Rclone is downloaded roughly 250,000 times each month, and has over 30,000 stars on GitHub. There are six core developers, and a great community of users and other developers at rclone.org. We talk a little bit about Nick’s development p...

Fujifilm's tape evangelist, Rich Gadomski, joins us for an interesting discussion on tape and LTO. We talk about the different subtrates that have been used over the years, and how that changed things. We then talk about LTO-9 and what that brings to market. We also talk about how tape has seen a bit of a resurgence in interest in the backup market due to the advent of ransomware. Always fun to ta...

The term "3-2-1 rule" comes up on almost every episode, and we have the guy that coined it with us on the podcast! How exciting! Peter Krogh coined the term fifteen years ago. He is now Chief Product Officer at Tandem Vault, but this week he is talking to us. He first talks about how he coined the term “3-2-1 Rule” while writing the first edition of The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photo...