How to Extract ROI from Backups

You found the backup wrap up your go-to podcast for all things

backup recovery and cyber recovery.

In this episode, we explore how to get an actual return on your investment out of

your backups instead of just treating them as an expensive insurance policy that.

Sits around and waits for a disaster.

Ask yourself, what if your backup infrastructure could

actually pay dividends?

Make your company money.

Persona and I dig into practical ways to extract an ROA from your backups.

Through test environments, security monitoring, compliance, checking,

and even, and especially these days, AI powered analytics.

We'll show you how the shift from tape to disc opened up these possibilities that

were honestly simply impossible before.

If you've ever wondered whether there's more to backup than just crossing your

fingers and hoping that you'll never need to use them, well this episode's for you.

By the way, if you don't know who I am, I'm w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr.

Backup.

And, uh, I've been doing, uh, backups for over 30 years.

Uh, basically ever since I had to tell my boss that there were no backups of the

production database that we had just lost.

I didn't want that to happen to me again, and I don't want that to happen to you.

That's why I do this.

On this podcast, we turn unappreciated backup admins into cyber recovery heroes.

This is the backup wrap up.

Welcome to the show.

Hi.

Welcome to Backup Central's, restore it All podcast.

I'm your host, w Curtis Preston.

And with me, as always is my fellow DIY enthusiast persona.

Molly Yondi.

Welcome to the Club Persona.

Thank you, Curtis.

Although, to be fair, this is not my first DIY,

No, it's not.

But I don't know.

I just feel like this was, this was something special.

but it's the first one where I've had to make multiple trips to Home

Depot in order to figure out, and it's funny, so to explain what's going on.

So over the weekend I had a water shutoff valve for our

sprinkler system that was leaking.

So I was like, okay, I should fix it because it's starting to get summertime

and it's probably best to do that.

So.

I was like, oh, let me try, and I, been delaying this, by

the way, for a year and a half,

Yeah,

like all of a sudden it started leaking.

Like I basically just turned it off because then it would stop leaking.

So it hasn't been working for a year and a half.

so no, no sprinkling.

Yeah, no sprinkle.

I literally would fill up, like, you know those, I dunno if you have

a Costco, but Costco sells like the mango juices and like those giant,

like half a gallon or one gallon

Mm-hmm.

the lingerers, I would fill that with water from the kitchen sink

and then go and water the plants.

So yes, so eventually I was like, okay, I should fix this.

So I was like, okay, it.

And I'm like, oh, it's one of those plastic shutoff valves that has a ball.

So I was like.

I know it's gonna be difficult if I have to replace it because you have

to like PVC, you gotta put glue, you gotta piece everything together.

I'm like, that's a huge project.

I was like, let me do the easy way first.

So I Googled on YouTube and they're like, Hey, there's

this O ring inside that leaks.

And so what you do is you just like pull off the handle and I pull out the

O ring and replace the O-ring and put it back together and you're all good to go.

So I was like, sweet.

So I started on that and process of removing the handle, I broke the handle.

Yeah.

And, uh, I went to like five different stores, bought five different valves

and took 'em apart to see if one of the handles, because I was like,

oh, lemme just replace the handle.

none of the handles would fit.

Nice.

I was like, oh man.

So now I was like, okay, I'm screwed.

then I was like, okay, I gotta bite the bullet.

What was going to hopefully be like a 30 minute project has now

gone on for an hour and a half.

Yeah.

been to the first store yet, so I went to the Home Depot and I met

this one really awesome guy who works there Eric shout out to you.

Uh, but he was like, Hey, this is exactly what you need.

And he's like, Hey, instead of doing what you're thinking of

doing, you just replace everything.

You'll be much happier.

And he like told me exactly what I needed.

He walked me through it,

Yeah.

bought everything, took it home, and then started putting it together.

Because remember at this point we don't have water in the house.

Right, right.

uh, so we started putting everything together, called Curtis a bunch

of times, put it together.

I was like, it dripped, it leaked.

I was like, Ugh.

So then slowly like tyd it and all the rest there's, and so at least

now I have water in the house.

I haven't finished the rest of the sprinkler stuff, there's

a slight, slight, slight drip.

So now I have to shut off the water and redo everything.

But it's, it was like four trips to

But

and.

Yeah.

Yeah, but, and you, and you know, and you know what you did wrong at this point.

You know what the, the problem is.

Yeah.

And I, uh, talked to my DIY expert, otherwise known as Mr. Backup, and,

uh, he was like, uh, send me a picture.

So I sent you a picture and you looked at it and you're like, uh,

you put the Teflon tape on backwards.

I was like, oh, ah.

Yeah.

Gotta put the Teflon tape in the direction of the threads.

Yeah,

Yeah, well, it's also one of those things because it was like it's

going in the opposite direction because it had double-sided thread.

So I was like, ah,

yeah.

so it's okay.

At least I know what I need to do, but now I gotta shut off

the water and then do that.

So,

Yeah, you got, you had a whole, but I mean, the thing that I saw there were a

whole bunch of threads because you got like, you got like the nipple plus the

adapter plus the, the shut up, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You good?

And then the thing

Yeah.

and so, yeah.

But

Good times.

it's not too much longer and I won't need to go back to

Home Depot, but we shall see.

Oh, don't say things like that.

Hmm.

Um,

least

so, um, yeah, and we're, we're not even gonna talk about why

I'm mad at Home Depot right now.

So, um, let's just say for the first time ever I'm actually

hiring them to do something.

And it has not been a fun process, but

is the exact opposite.

'cause normally I'm not a fan of Home Depot 'cause I can

never find someone to help me.

yeah.

talked about

Yeah.

before and

Yeah.

Depot 'cause you're like, I know exactly what I need.

And now our like, uh, roles are reversed.

So

Yeah.

Weird, huh?

full moon.

It's um, well actually, you know what?

Today is the day we're recording it, it's Haley's Comet Day.

Oh,

Haley's comets.

They're, they're saying, yeah, it is saying tomorrow, but they're

saying tonight and tomorrow night we should get some real meteor

showers, um, from Haley's comment.

So anyway.

Well, we are gonna talk about some fun stuff today.

Um, you know, we talk about in backup a lot, one of the issues

that people have with backup is that it's just a money sink, right.

A money pit.

Right.

It's just, it doesn't ever, it never brings any value.

To the business unless,

need it.

until you really, really, really need it.

right?

It's like your car

Yeah,

your

yeah, exactly.

Right.

And, and yeah, and like, yeah, and like.

Most insurance, it adds no value to your life unless

really bad things happen, right?

And so this episode is about are there other things that we

could be doing with our backups that would potentially at least,

I don't know, add some incremental business value?

Uh, or whatever the appropriate term is in the, in the governmental world, right?

The incremental value to the organization that would help

minimize the pain of that, of that.

Check that by that, that dates me, doesn't it?

Yes.

the fact that I use the term check.

Um.

Bitcoins that you have to use are the

Yeah.

The, yeah, the Bitcoins.

Um, you know, I, I, I, again, I'll, I'll tell a story from the old days.

So I remember back when the, the, the organization that

I was, my very first job,

before

what.

you have to use the phrase, what phrase do you have to use when

Back.

Back in the day.

There you go.

in the day.

So back in the day, back in 1993 before my daughter was even born.

Um, that.

We ran out of ta, you know, the, the organization was growing in size.

It just logarithmically really from the time I joined to the time I left,

and which always means more backups and it means running out of tapes.

Back then it meant running out of tapes.

And, um, I remember going to my boss and basically saying, Hey,

you know, we we're out of tapes.

And, um, the, it was interesting because, um, I. Uh, purchases for over, like,

over a certain, uh, number was like considered a capital purchase, even though

this was really very much an expense.

So it was a very big deal that I was asking for.

Like I remember the number was like $16,000 in, in tapes

and is a lot of tapes, right?

But, but, but we needed a lot of tapes and I remember the boss, my boss,

saying to me, Susan saying to me.

Is there any other option

Mm.

than spending this $16,000?

And I said, yes.

She said, what is it?

I can, I can stop backing up stuff.

Or it should be like you should stop creating data.

Yeah.

Yeah, you could, you could stop making more stuff.

Um, so, uh, yeah, it, so backups have always been this, like money sink.

The, I'm sorry, why do I keep saying Money sink.

Money pit.

I will also say that there have been some changes in backup design

that are going to facilitate some of the things that we talk about when

we talk about, uh, bringing some business value out of the backup data.

The biggest of which is moving off of tape.

As the, as the primary backup mechanism because when, when backups were on

tape and, and you know, backups are still on tape, there's still many,

quite a bit of backups on tape.

Um, but when it was the primary and, and only place that you stored backup

data, getting any additional value out of that data was I, I mean, it,

it's just literally something that we never even discussed because

there, there was no way to do it.

Well, and I think it's also, at the time, I don't think people

thought about these other use cases

Hmm.

may not have existed back then.

I

Yeah.

modern arch software architecture and designs have allowed

for a lot more use cases

Mm-hmm.

they used to have in the past.

Yeah, I, but I would also say, even though, like when we look at

things like tests and dev, we had tests and dev, but I. The best you

could do was use your backups to restore production into something,

Yeah,

and it was still so challenging that most people just didn't even think about it.

Right.

They, they just didn't even consider that as an option.

Mm-hmm.

but I think this is also where if we look at storage systems

like NetApp at the time, right?

With snapshots where it's like, hey, in clones, right?

You can quickly take a clone of a volume, start using it for test and

dev and other purposes like that.

So I think that was like, oh yeah, we should be able to do more things with it.

And actually, maybe we should just jump into like some of

these use cases since we're

Well,

to it.

well actually, before, before we do that, uh, I, I think that it's

really important that you, you made an important point there, and that

is that when I said that there have been some changes in backup design.

There have been.

Sort of two really big changes.

One is just the use of disc in general

Mm-hmm.

in various forms, which includes just file system disc.

It includes object based storage, it includes filer based type

storage and, and ddu ddu storage.

All of that as as, it just, it's just much more flexible, even if we did

nothing else, that provides a lot of flexibility, but I do think that.

When I look back on things, I think NetApp gets a lot of credit here as

being a pioneer of not changing just.

That we're gonna use disc for backups, but also how we're gonna make those backups.

And for a really long time there was this, um, and, and I'll still stand by

the, the phrase if we, if we, if we, if we leave it just alone, and that

is that a snapshot isn't a backup.

Right.

If we go back 20 years, NetApp's at least 20 years old, right?

More than 20 years, I think

Yeah.

Okay.

So back when, back of NetApp was just NetApp and pre-snap mirror.

There was a time when there was no snap mirror.

Right.

Okay.

Um, so when it was just a box and it had, um, just snapshots, I

would've been alongside everyone else saying A snapshot is not a backup.

Right.

Um, unfortunately.

Well, because it's relying on the primary.

A, a, a traditional snapshot at that time.

Well, even a snapshot at this time relies on the primary.

It's literally, I used to make the phrase, a snapshot is as good of a

backup of your data as a snapshot of your house is when your house catches fire.

Right, right.

It relies on the primary in order to, to, to function.

But then once NetApp and other companies, uh, followed their, uh, example.

They started replicating these snapshots to other locations

and now we have both versioning.

The, what, that's what snapshots brought was versioning and also replication.

So we have another copy of the data in another location.

Um, but once they did that, because now we're storing backups in a

way that is immediately useful.

You don't have to restore, as I make quotes in the air, you

don't have to restore it per se.

You just need to make it available.

Yeah.

And then if we look at modern, um, systems

There are also backup vendors that have kind of led discharge as well,

where they're storing backups.

So traditionally, most backup vendors have stored their backups

in some sort of encapsulated format.

Tar, for example, with NetBackup, networker had

their, what did they call that?

Their open tape format?

Is that what they call it?

I don't remember.

It's been too

Well, anyway, yeah.

So they had their form.

Every backup vendor had their format, right?

great

Um,

and lock-in, but

yeah.

Yeah.

also, but

Yeah.

allows them to optimize what

Yeah, yeah,

done.

yeah.

So traditionally that's what they did.

When I look back on the first company that I remember really doing what

I'm thinking about here is Veeam,

Mm-hmm.

where they started storing their backups in a, in a native format.

Yeah.

So that, um, and, and originally I remember like when they were

kind of early, I remember.

Me not liking the fact that, that you couldn't search their backups,

Yeah.

They're like, you don't need to search it.

You just, you just mount, you just mount the VM from two days ago

and just go get whatever you want.

And at the time, I remember going, uh, I don't like that.

Right?

I, I wanna search my, you know, um, but this, this really, uh, it

was a new way of storing backups so that you could instantly.

Um, access that data.

And that led to this idea of things like instant restores,

Mm-hmm.

Uh, you wanna describe what an instant restore is,

Yeah.

An instant restore is before we get to Instant Restore.

So your typical restore is you have to first sort of copy the data out of the

system, right, to wherever it needs to go to the target system, and then

you could start the recovery process

right?

to be what?

Right.

Restore is, you don't need to do that copy.

You can instantly access the data from that backup system and start using it.

And then you could do things like, okay, if it's a virtual machine, I can

mount it and start running it off the backup storage system and then I can

move it or migrate it using storage vMotion or other technologies to the

production location without any downtime.

So it allows

Yeah.

reduce the RTO.

Yeah.

I.

to be able to start accessing your data.

Definitely reduces the RTO right?

Well, technically reduces the RTA, the recovery time.

Actual, yeah.

So it allows you to meet, I'm such a pedantic

I

jerk sometimes.

Uh, 'cause the RTO shouldn't change right?

Un unless we're like, Hey, we can, we can have a tighter RTO now.

Right?

So the, the objective could be made tighter.

Um, but the um, uh, and this.

I think that's the first one that I re really remember doing it like that.

There are other ways to do it.

Uh, there are other ways where if you don't put everything

inside encapsulated blobs, right?

Like tar, if you're storing everything as lots of little pieces, I. If you're

able to then put all those pieces together and just present them all

at the same time as an image, that's another way to do instant restore.

But the point is this, the, these newer ways of storing backups

have allowed this, this ability to access data in a random fashion

Mm-hmm.

without the massive.

Need to do a big restore right.

Before you can do anything

Yeah.

And I know that we're talking about sort of.

Instant restores, but I look at that as a technology.

And then there's the use cases on top of it,

e

right?

right.

Instant Restore is one use case.

The next one that also comes to mind is test and dev, which I think Veeam was one

of the first to sort of solidify this and actually lead the market in this space.

Yeah.

you have a backup, you want to verify, did things work right?

Right, and the problem is that you would need to create your own

sort of test environment, spin it up, right, configure it, copy the

data out, potentially all the rest.

And V made it very easy where you can almost create an isolated test

environment in VMware automatically.

Yep.

Restore your VM or spin up your VM there with new IP addresses so there's

no conflicts, everything else, access it, do whatever testing you need, and

then sort of tear down the system.

Yeah, and, and you can actually create, um, they, they call,

this is called Sure Backup and, and Veeam, and you could create.

Um, basically a, a recovery group and it will do all of this together, right?

And so you can test an entire environment together.

And that what that, that, what that's doing is it's, it's just adding a.

At least initially what we're talking about is just testing

the backup to make sure it works.

So what you're doing is you're increasing confidence

Yep.

in your, that your backup system can do what it needs to do,

when it needs to do it right?

But what that also does is when you have the ability to access data, um.

Like live like that, whether we're talking via the, like the, the snapshot way, the

the live backup way or the live restore way, or sorry, or instant recovery way,

and any method that allows you to directly mount the backup, um, read, write.

Now you, you need to do that in a way, by the way, that doesn't

impact the backup, right?

You, you need to create like a view, uh, to use a database term.

You need to create a view into that backup that allows you to 'cause,

in order to mount it and actually turn it on as a vm, you're, you're

gonna need to do read, write,

Yep.

uh, so you need to do that in a way that doesn't impact the original backup, right?

Yep.

Um, any of those methods that allow, that allow, I think these other

use cases that we're talking about, and the first one that you talked

about was, was test and dev, right?

So we've got, we are, um, a. You know, any type of shop that's doing

an agile development net, even if they're not using Agile development.

But it, I think, you know, many people are using Agile, right?

Um, is that you can use this to easily spin up whatever you want,

um, to be able to, um, to, to either develop against an act, you know,

essentially an active copy of the data.

So there, there's a process.

When you do this, there's a process that you can go through.

I, I've seen different terms for it.

Data de-identification, data anonymization, data sanitization.

Basically the, the only problem with taking.

A copy of production data and then doing development with it is you've

got production data and development.

Right?

And there's potential, there's PII there, what, it's a very American term, but

personal identification there that, um, that could, would, could be a problem if

you're using it in development, right?

So you could, again, you could automate this process of taking a production

copy and then anonymizing that data so that you can, you're using.

Production like data in your development.

And then also once you've done your development, you can test it against that.

In fact, you could actually, once it's true test, you could test it against

actual, you know, non anonymized data, uh, as long as you kept it

in, in an appropriate environment.

Yeah.

And a lot of the companies that were.

in this space, they also refer to it as copy data management.

So one of

Yeah.

that, uh, is very popular at the time was Actifio,

Yeah.

being able to spin off copies.

I think they were acquired by IBMI believe.

So things like that.

Where it is, you have all these copies, it's how do you manage 'em, how do

you make it simple to spin 'em up?

How do you also have the governance in place so people aren't

doing bad things with the data?

Yeah.

And, and so I think, yeah, and, and, and CDM copy data management, you know,

that was, I. I am saying was it's, I don't hear that too much anymore.

Um, you know, you heard it a lot when Actifio was a big brand, right?

Um, I think the concept is strong.

I think the, the challenge that most people had with it is, I.

They want, they wanted to boil the ocean with that, right?

They wanted to do all the copies, they wanted to have the backup

copies plus the, you know, you know, plus all yeah, everything, right?

And so I, I sort of like C-D-P-C-D P's an amazing concept until

you try to pay for it, right?

Um, and so you don't wanna do everything with CDP, you wanna just

do what you really need it for.

Um, the.

Uh, I think what you're seeing with a lot of these products that we're

starting to see is that you're starting to see people doing CDM, like.

Yeah.

Uh, use cases with backups.

And again, this is because so many of these products are storing backups in

a way that allow them to very easily, uh, either the way Veeam does it, or

I know, you know, you know, our former employer, Druva, the way they stored

the data, they could easily do like this, like, um, sort of virtual, like

a view representation of the, of the data, uh, you know, very quickly because

they're in the cloud and they can,

Mm-hmm.

you know.

Cloud is magic.

Um, so yeah, so that test and dev is, is a good example of 'em.

. So the next one we have is let's talk about security, uh, and

compliance applications here.

So what do you, what do you think are security applications with things

that we could do with backups that we couldn't do, I don't know, 10 years ago?

There's a, so the thing about backups is, is basically has all the data

from everywhere in the organization,

Mm-hmm.

right?

You could start to look for patterns.

You could look at accesses, who's accessing what data,

where copies are going.

Um, there's also things you could do, for instance, if you get hit by ransomware.

Okay?

I now understand the signature of the ransomware.

Where does that live in my environment?

So you now have a centralized location of all your data that you could

start searching for, to be able to identify some of these security issues?

You can do like, um, basically sim, sim sort type, uh, you know,

or, or XDR, basically all of these techniques, you could do them with a

sync, a centralized copy of the data.

Yeah.

and I, I do, I still, I still go back to I agree with what, what

I used to hear a lot at Druva, which was, um, if we're the reason.

That you know, that you have a ransomware attack.

This is a problem,

Yeah.

right?

Like, but it's still better to know than not, than to not know.

Right?

Um, yeah.

Hopefully you've got a, a, a number of different thing.

But this, this is the idea of defense in depth.

And you're right, it is a centralized place from which you can see a lot of

things that you can perhaps from that vantage point, see patterns that you.

Might not see, uh, otherwise.

And I, I, I gotta bring up, I gotta bring up an old story again from Bang Monday.

And, um, the, um,

um, we were implementing.

This is again, in my very first job in backups and we were going

to be implementing what we now think of as like HSM or something.

It wasn't HSM, it was just it, it was, it was like bad HSM, where basically we said

if you've had a file on your file system and you haven't, you haven't touched it

for 18 months, we're gonna delete it.

We got it on 57 backup tapes.

We keep our backup tapes for seven years.

If you really need to file, we can get, we can get it back

for you, but we need space.

And so we're gonna start deleting your crap.

And as the, as the, uh, it's a bit like, uh, you know, like with real id, with

the, with the, um, how that they kept delaying the implementation of real id.

It was the same thing.

We're like, as the date approached it, you know, people started getting,

and we started getting down to that date of like, okay, this is it.

This is the date.

And then one day.

Um, and, and mind you, it just, again, I just gotta just give you

like, like a, what do you call it, A frame of reference here.

Our biggest server was seven gigabytes.

Oh boy.

And what was happening was, and the, and the, the way we did the backups, we do

one full back, one weekly, full backup.

And we would, we didn't have enough tapes to do all the full backups in one day.

I'm sorry, tape drives to

Mm-hmm.

all the full backups in one day.

We would rotate those full backups across, across the week.

And, um, because again.

Backups have always been too expensive.

This is kind of what the point is, right?

And so, but one day, one of the servers, Zeus, I remember, um, it's incremental

backups were shooting through the roof.

They were taking forever, every single day.

Their backups were, were, shoot, you know, taking, they

weren't, they weren't finishing.

Hmm.

And we started looking.

And what we saw was that e every I. File in every home directory

was being changed every single day.

Does someone just have like a touch command or something to just.

Yeah, so what happened was somebody called in to the help desk and

they're like, how can we make sure that our stuff doesn't get deleted?

And they said, well put this command in your DOT profile.

Right?

Which for those that don't know, Unix was a thing that got

ran every time you logged in.

And it basically, it wasn't just a touch star, it was like a fine dot

pipe to, you know, so basically.

Touch, change the modification time on every single file in your, uh,

home directory every single time you logged in, which basically

meant every night became a full.

Yeah.

um, uh, we, we put a stop to that really quick and, and, you know,

we all referred to it as it was, it was the finance department, and

we said we, we caught the finance department, uh, touching themselves.

Um.

Oh, card ass.

Anyway, so, uh, where were we?

What, what were we talking about?

Something?

and compliance.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there there is, there is a lot of centralized stuff.

You can look for things.

So we talked about the security ramifications.

We, we can look for things that are not compliant.

We can look for file types that are not compliant.

We are not a multimedia making company.

There shouldn't be video files.

Um, I can think all the way back.

To, um, my very first job, like after, this is my very first consulting job, so

it was my first job after that job and we.

Without going into details, we found the most inappropriate videos that you

could possibly find, uh, being stored on servers in our, uh, corporate data center.

Mm.

And you can look for videos, you can look for types of files.

Um, I remember, I do remember one, um, uh, uh, a restore that I got.

Resume.

I told you the Zum doc.

Yeah, yeah.

We, somebody says, Hey, I, I wanna do the Zum doc.

You can look for file names, you can look for file types and you can

look, you can use hashes, right?

You can look for, there are ways for data to be hidden, right?

You can, there are, there are, um.

There are mechanisms you can use to reveal what the real type of a file is,

even if the, the, the, you know, the extension or whatever doesn't say that.

And so you can do that.

You can also look for things like.

You can use regular expressions to look for things like a, again, I,

I can really only speak to the US Social security numbers should not be

in plain text in a spreadsheet, uh, you know, in a, in a document, right.

Um, other personal identifi.

So you can, you could do, uh, compliance.

Um, now of course you're gonna end up giving yourself more work, but you could

potentially save your company millions of dollars in the, in the long run.

yeah,

Yeah.

Uh, and then finally we have, uh, analytics and business intelligence.

And this is something that I think this has been somewhat of a pie

in the sky idea for a long time.

What do you think?

I would say at least decade.

At least a decade we've talked about it

Yep.

and, um, the idea that we're storing all this data.

It's randomly accessible.

Isn't there some way that we could look at this data and we can do

something, do something with it?

Again, you've got this centralized view from which we can view the organization,

not just like it's like three dimensional, but it's it's time as well as is now.

Right.

Yeah.

And I do think, and I think that, that that idea reached a fever pitch.

A couple of years ago with AI

Mm-hmm.

that we started seeing how, how long has, is Che GPT been a thing?

Because that's really when like AI just filled everyone's brain.

Has it been two years?

18 months maybe.

Yeah.

So like.

But even before that, 'cause I remember, 'cause I know I've been,

I've gone from Druva for a couple of years now, and before I left Druva,

Chatt really became a thing, right?

And we like, oh man, we gotta figure out a way to, you know, connect these things.

Right.

And fast forward to last week, right?

Well, two weeks ago now.

Yeah.

was at Veeam on, and you know, if, if you follow the show religiously and you

listened to a couple episodes ago, you would've seen my, my talk on this already.

But I got to see it like it, it was, it was just, it was really amazing where

they, they had a Veeam environment.

Now this was like, they made a point of saying.

When they demoed, they did, they demoed like 20 over 20 things and

they said some of the things you're gonna see are literally hours old.

They're like, we're coding them right now.

There's guys, you know,

Yeah.

thousand monkeys at the keyboard in the back, you know.

a live demo,

Nothing like a live demo and everything.

And by the way, they, they, they did all this, uh, preface, uh,

Anton Sev made all this things.

It was like, I hope it works.

I hope it, like it was like, uh, and, and everything worked flawlessly.

It really, it really did.

But what I saw was they, they had hooked up the, basically they are now announcing

that they're going to be doing this.

This connection between anthropic MCP and Veeam backups and.

I am not an expert in this space, but what I saw, I, I do

use Claude quite a bit, right?

Which is the anthropic tool.

What it looked like to me was they, they had two tabs.

One was they had a bunch of backups.

They, they just claimed that what they had was a bunch of

backups that were about weather.

Mm-hmm.

So they have one tab that was search where they could just search, you

know, what, what, what backups do you have that are about weather?

And it came up with like a Google like search.

That,

Mm-hmm.

that alone was cool, but then it was like, what can you tell me about the weather?

It had a different tab where it just looked like Claude to me, and it was like,

tell me what can you tell me about the weather based on the backups that we have?

mm.

And it was like, you know, and it basically wrote out a report and I

was like, oh, that is really cool.

Right.

And, and you know, I've been in software long enough to know

that, you know, I can all be total smoke and mirrors, but it was, but

You're like,

I watched it.

Right.

I, it was amazing.

And I, and I, again, it goes back to that it's made possible by the fact

that the backups are stored on disc

Mm-hmm.

stored in a, in a way that you can access them natively.

Yep.

And so I. It brings up lots of security and privacy questions.

And, and I had a, a really good chat with them about that.

And they, and they absolutely knew that they needed to come out with

their AI statement before this ever touched any customer data.

And he, he did verify to me that there wasn't any path between your

data and anthropic and you know, that, that they're not gonna be

using your data to train anything.

It's, it's a private instance.

Um, but that was just.

You know, it's like the first time you ever, um, it's like the first time I,

I, I don't know if you haven't at this point, gone and used AI in some fashion.

If you haven't done some of the amazing things you could do in ai.

Um.

I, you gotta, you gotta go try it out.

And it, that first time you do that, you're like, oh my goodness.

Right.

Yeah.

and it, it's so good at like summarizing things that, that's like, to me that's

like the best, like it's never gonna come up with anything new technically,

because, but you could also argue there's nothing new under the sun.

Right.

Um,

but it's

and that's that.

in different ways

It is able to make connections in different ways, right.

And, and, and suggest things.

And, um, you know, we use it all the time for this podcast.

We use it to help us come up with titles and, and to summarize the podcast.

Um, and the, the first time you see it do something like that is amazing.

We're not real.

we.

You remember the episode?

We actually made ai, we made our AI voices.

We actually had an episode where we had, we had, uh, 'cause the editor that

I use has an AI copy of our voices.

And I can fix, if I say words wrong, like I say the wrong word, I can actually

fix, uh, I can swap it out with my voice.

And that offends some people.

Sorry.

Um, but uh, yeah.

Anyway.

we talked about all these use cases, right?

I think the

Yeah.

that I think is important is a person focused on backup, your primary goal

going all the way back to the beginning is your insurance for the company.

You cannot fail that job.

Right.

The company looks at you for that last line of defense.

We're making sure everything works.

All these other things about doing more with backups are in addition

to that core foundational thing.

If you ever falter and sort of take away from that core foundation,

none of this other stuff matters.

I, I couldn't have said it about it myself.

That that's actually gr That's a great point.

Um, persona that you, you, that this is about bringing value to

the thing you're already doing.

You cannot stop the thing you're already doing.

And let me give you a perfect example of something that I have

talked to some people about.

Things I'd like to do with a backup where I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Okay.

And this is this idea of the right to be forgotten,

Mm-hmm.

right?

Where people have discussed the concept of surgically altering backups to

take your name out of the backup data.

And I'm like, I'm sorry.

That is just, that is, that is fundamentally against.

The backup, the design of all backups.

Known demand.

You cannot go.

You know, go and, and, and alter backups besides the fact that

just backups should be immutable.

Yep.

your backups are immutable.

They're probably not statistically speaking, but hopefully they are.

And if they're not, you should be looking at that.

Go read, you know, listen to our episodes about immutability and how

important that is and how easy it is actually to do that nowadays.

Right.

Um, versus bugging the, um, but you, you, you, you can't.

You can't go focusing on these to the, to the detriment of,

of the core function of backup.

Right.

It's gotta, it's gotta do that.

Um, because if you do ever actually need your backups, uh, they

need to actually do the thing.

Yep.

Yeah, that's a great point to end on.

Persona, thank you very much.

No, thank you Curtis.

And hopefully my DIY stuff goes okay.

Or I may be calling you and asking you to fly up to Santa Clara to help me

Yeah,

I break,

I think that would be a highly inefficient use of both of our time.

But I'll be happy to have FaceTime,

Yes, listen.

uh, wouldn't be the first time.

All right.

Well, uh, thank you to our listeners.

You know, you're why we're here.

And, uh, that is a wrap.

The backup wrap up is written, recorded, and produced by me w Curtis Preston.

If you need backup or Dr. Consulting content generation or expert witness

work, check out backup central.com.

You can also find links from my O'Reilly Books on the same website.

Remember, this is an independent podcast and any opinions that

you hear are those of the speaker and not necessarily an employer.

Thanks for listening.