Episodes

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...

In May of 2020, Tony Mendoza of Spectra Logic found out his company had been attacked by ransomware. Hear his harrowing tale of how long it took just to get the data center ready for a restore, and then the various tools they used to bring things back online. He did not want to pay that ransom! Spectra Logic is actually a tape vendor, so Tony has a unique viewpoint. We thank him so much for being so candid about his experience. You will learn a lot. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

Rob Morrison joins us from Bacula Systems, the commercial arm of the open-source backup product, Bacula. It's tagline is that it roams the datacenter at night and sucks the vital essence from your computers. Bacula Systems has come a long way since I first saw them years ago. Check out what they're been up to. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

This week’s episode is dedicated to my friend Jim Bougor, who passed on this week. Jim, this week’s guest (Darryl Baker), and I all worked at Collective Technologies back in the day. Darryl comes with over 30 years of backup and IT experience, and he and I walk down memory lane about the way things used to be with backups. Apropos for women’s history month, we also talk about Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace a little bit. The Grace Hopper speech Darryl references can be seen here: https://www.youtu...

Chainkit Founder & CEO Val Bercovici returns to the podcast to build on what we learned last week. This week we talk about how distributed ledger technology (such as the one in BlockChain, but there are others), can be used to increase security. We talk about the SolarWinds hack and how that could have been prevented using such technology. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

We invite blockchain expert Val Bercovici, Founder & CEO of ChainKit, on the podcast to explain the basics of distributed ledgers, as well as the biggest distributed ledger – BlockChain. He explains what a distributed ledger is and why you might want one. We then talk about why someone would contribute to such a ledger, meaning why you would volunteer your resources to be part one – a process known as "mining." Then, as a precursor to our next episode, we talk a little bit about the security pos...

Prasanna and Curtis discuss the importance of occasionally refreshing your hardware (or virtual hardware) and how important backup in in that scenario. There are many modern tools that can help you migrate from one thing to another (e.g. iPhone migration), but you'd better also have a decent backup. We also discuss the pros and cons of TimeMachine. It's nice, but not perfect. (Still better than anything in WIndows, though.) Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

Julie Ulrich, Systems Engineer at Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan, joins us on this episode to talk about her experiences with NetBackup and Rubrik in her world. She’s been working in backups for over 25 years, so has seen a number of iterations of both products. We talk about many of the challenges she had with NetBackup that led her to considering Rubrik, as well as the pros and cons of using Rubrik. We also talk a little about her concerns about Microsoft 365. Mentioned in this episode: I...

These are the kinds of stories that keep you up at night. UK police deleted hundreds of thousands of records. Sysadmin accidentally deleting thousands of users. A new backup "feature" that made the backups worthless. The infamous story of Toy Story getting deleted with no backups! All this and more! Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

In another fascinating look into a very different world (backup-wise), we are delighted to have Timo Piiparinen from Multicom in Finland. He’s been in the IT industry for over 40 years at the same company! TImo gave us a fascinating look into a very different backup world. He makes a case for tape in the backup system (something I gave up on a while ago) because he’s using a backup software vendor that didn’t give up on the medium and actually innovated for it. Using a unique multiplexing setup ...

We welcome Andrew Wertkin, Chief Strategy Officer of BlueCat, a DNS, DHCP, & IPAM (DDI) security company. Like backup, properly securing these parts of your infrastructure are both extremely important – and everyone thinks it's boring. I knew nothing about DDI before this recording and I learned a ton about the ways that bad actors use these technologies to either attack or exploit your company. Using technologies like Bluecat can actually stop ransomware in its tracks! Andrew explains exactly h...

Vanessa Toves joins us again to explain exactly why you need to backup Microsoft 365 and similar services. We talk about how Microsoft is only responsible for that platform; you are responsible for the data. Particular attention is given to the idea that somehow Retention Policies are a substitute for backup. She explains exactly why that is not the case. In fact, her experience with such policies has her struggling to wrap her head around why someone would want to do that. Mentioned in this ep...

Vanessa Toves, a Microsoft 365 expert, joins us on Restore it All to explain the unique architecture of Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office365). We talk about Teams and Groups, and how many people misuse both. We cover Sharepoint's role in this as well, and how Exchange Online figures into the picture. This was originally going to just be an overview, but our architecture questions just kept coming, and Vanessa kept answering them. This episode lays a good foundation of what we will cover in...

Prasanna and Curtis wax philisophical at the end of 2020, and try to predict what they think will happen next year. We look forward to the end of 2020 (don't we all?) and look with a positive outlook to 2021. We talk about the vaccine, and what it's going to be like getting back to work, and whether or not there will be a new normal there that's not like what it was. We talk about SaaS products and their prevalence, as well as the emergence of a number of backup products based on Kubernetes. 202...

Fathom Analytics (https://www.usefathom.com) is a privacy-first analytics engine, and they were attacked in November 2020 via a very big DDOS attack that threatened their core business. Jack Ellis, co-founder of Fathom Analytics, is a developer and first used the developer mindset to address this threat. He quickly realized he was out of his depth and decided to call for help. The AWS Shield Advanced team came to the rescue and helped them shut down the attack, and helped to stop additional atta...

We get a closer look at the eye of the storm. A few episodes ago, we had an anonymous guest we called Harry Potter, who told us what it was like to manage a DR remotely. This week we hear from the man on the ground, recovering two datacenters after a hurricane wiped out the island where they resided. We learn all sorts of lessons, especially about how so much of a disaster recovery has very little to do with what backup people think of when they think about a "recovery." In fact, we spend almost...

Cornelia Davis, 30-year industry veteran and CTO of Weaveworks, explains what cloud-native design is and why it matters. She explains that you do not have to go fully cloud-native on day one if you are moving an app to the cloud, but everything you do "refactor" to a cloud-native architecture will be more resilient, scalable, and cost you less to operate. We talk about Kubernetes and how that figures into everything, but how it is not the only way to be cloud-native. Listeners to the podcast ca...

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 this point, as well as giving a little info about another vaccine that is expected to announce soon...