Episodes

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 backup in the last twenty years. Thanks to an olive branch from Cameron, though, they may have come t...

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 against Amazon for failure to get permission to track users. Then finally we discuss Prasanna's experie...

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 you back this monster up! (We also discuss why it's named CockroachDB, and it's exactly what we thought!) ...

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. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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 offerings as a service. We then have a very interesting discussion about the use of the multi-region objec...

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. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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, over 30 of which with Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh. This is both a very entertaining a...

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. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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 (especially) the all-important questions about backups. We also talk about the need for establishing...

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 that was there, even correcting a misunderstanding Mr. Backup has had for many years. If the phrase "ma...

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 perspective as well. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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 the things they were going to do to make things better, and we discuss what he said. We talk about the...

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 challenge, but Mike brings up other challenges, such as mergers and acquisitions, and salespeople importi...

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 using both cloud-native apps that have resiliency built in, vs having to add resiliency to your own ...

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. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

Datacenter manager Dan Frith (@penguinpunk) joins us on the podcast for our first discussion of the #OVHFire. A massive fire destroyed a datacenter of a large cloud provider in Europe, and millions of websites disappeared. We talk about the lessons we can learn from this event. Dan talks about how outsourcing the servers doesn't outsource the responsibility for data protection. I make the point that this fire shows what happens when you completely rely on a single entity for both production and...

It only took us 100 episodes, but we finally got Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam, as our guest on the podcast. Dave and Curtis go way back, and this was a great discussion. We cover the proper use of tape, and what it was like for Dave when he went to Veeam. Another big discussion point was Dave clearing up misconceptions (some of which may have come from this podcast) about what Insight Partners acquiring Veeam really meant. We then get into a great discussion about how Veeam w...

Our anonymous guest this week is from a Fortune 100 company who is considering swapping out their backup product. Our guest has been at the company for over 20 years, and remembers swapping out NetWorker for NetBackup many years ago. Now he is considering swapping out NetBackup to address his challenges with that product. We discuss a number of topics, including the age-old argument of who should be in charge of database backups, as well as the challenges of moving to a modern backup product whe...

A Veeam user warns of what he felt is a confusing option in Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. He says he likes the product, but that the first retention setting mentioned in the documentation (item-level retention) might not do what you think it does. He thinks everyone should use snapshot-level retention, which behaves more traditionally. We also discuss IBM Spectrum Protect (AKA TSM) a little bit, as they also use that product. Our guest is speaking on conditions of anonymity, so we gave him a f...

Adi Ruppin, founder of Ananda Networks, joins us on the podcast to discuss how they secure – and increase the performance of – network traffic without deploying a VPN or SD-WAN. He talks about how the technologies we use for networking are actually very old designs that come with a lot of downsides. Ananda Networks aims to address those downsides while giving you everything a VPN and SD-WAN do – and more. Faster and more secure internet connections without the technologies we usually use for suc...

It's hard to believe, but this is our 100th episode! Prasanna and Curtis discuss the favorite topics we've had over 100 episodes, as well as the many things we've learned along the way. We talk about containers and K8s, tape, COVID-19, election security, and how recoveries are impacted by other factors. We also talked extensively about ransomware, and talked to someone who had actually been through a recovery from an attack. We talked about DDI, cloud backups, the importance of segregating your ...

Russ Cantwell (@rcantw3ll), CTO of SHI Corp, joins us to talk about Kubernetes, the Container Storage Interface (CSI), and backups. Before we get to that, however, we talk about how he, his pregnant wife, and two-year old child all got COVID-19. We discuss how that went and continues to go, and then we talk about Kubernetes. (If you're not interested in our banter, and just want to hear about K8s, just fast-forward to 11:50.) Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

Another industry veteran, Jose Calhariz. joins us this week to explain how he uses the community versions of two open-source backup tools to meet his university's backup needs, while saving money. We have a very interesting discussion that includes coverage of dump, tar, and Amanda. Jose also tells a great story of a huge recovery he had to do, that took several days. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

Darren McBride, CEO of Highly Reliable Systems (http://high-rely.com/ ) joins us on this podcast to talk about their product, which he says is designed for SMBs to get reliable offsite backup without using tape or an Internet connection. They have purpose-built appliances that support mirroring, but with removable disks. This product has been on the market for almost twenty years, but is having a surge in demand due to the desire by many companies to have an air-gapped backup for ransomware prot...