Episodes

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 many exabytes of disk in the wild. It's a scale-out storage system without all the typical East-West t...

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, how it is laid out just like any other business, the weapons it uses to spread ransomware, and its...

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 what a tape recovery business is, and what it was like to do that. We also talk about tape backup, ...

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 happened in January – that we just learned about last week. That's right, we just found out about a hac...

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, and .... it failed spectacularly! It all came down to the documentation they were so proud of. Hea...

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 it make sense to use on-premises backup to backup a cloud resource like SaaS? Mentioned in this epi...

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. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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 same point. We start with an overview of why it's important, then we take on the various arguments use...

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, and what it's like to restore part of a MySQL database. Luckily, the folks at LiquidWeb were very hel...

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 podcast on all the usual podcast channels, or watch the video version on youtube here: https://youtu.be/...

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 backup data, along with whose responsibility is it? We pause the recording for what appears at first to...

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. We then discuss the book, Learning MySQL 2nd edition, and Vinny's top 3 performance suggestions for ...

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 practices and regulations, drawing on Prasanna's new experience protecting the privacy of Zoom's custom...

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, Networking and Kubernetes, by James Strong and Vallery Lancey, including why the decided to write it, and w...

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. It's an attempt to LEARN from the misfortunes of others – not to take joy in them. Solid discussion...

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.backupcentral.com/how-do-you-prove-your-backup-service-is-real-restore-it-all-podcast-106/ https://...

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, which is the second largest island in the US and has to satisfy its backup and DR needs while stayi...

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 encrypted. (All backups are encrypted in flight, of course, because they are all over SSH.). The se...

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 philosophy, which is that he doesn’t mind adding features - as long as they don’t break backwards co...

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 talk to someone that can talk at this depth on such things. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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 Photographers, now in it’s 3rd edition. He didn’t invent the idea of three copies and offsite backup, bu...

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, according to Denny, who talks to Microsoft people all the time. We first talk about performance tuning, a...

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 capacity of a particular magnetic medium without creating more problems.) We have reached this limit on dis...

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 maintain that infrastructure. It's a fascinating approach to this age-old problem. Check them out at ht...