Backup to Basics: Traditional Data Sources
We’re going back to basics in 2024! Our hosts revisit their smash hit episode from last year all about protecting those traditional data sources like physical servers, VMs, laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. From on-prem to mobile, should it all get backed up? How and why? Tune in as Curtis and Prasanna rehash their spirited debate over backup best practices across your infrastructure and walk through real-world examples of what can go wrong. It’s chock full of fundamental wisdom for data protection pros getting started and veterans alike. Whether you’re making big cloud migrations or maintaining legacy systems, don’t miss this special re-release dedicated to the building blocks of backup as we start the year on a backup to basics kick.
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ATR2500x-USB Microphone & Logitech BRIO: This first episode of 2024 is a
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validation of all the backup, the basics episodes we've been doing.
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Because our most popular episode from 2023 was a basics episode
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on what you need to back up.
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You can't get much more basic than that.
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This episode is a rebroadcast of that, and it's dedicated to what we
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now call traditional backup sources, servers, VMs, desktops, laptops,
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and of course mobile devices.
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We talk about which of them need to be backed up and why along with the
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logic that I use when deciding whether or not to back up a particular device.
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Enjoy the new year, kick back and enjoy this rebroadcast of our
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most popular episode of last year.
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For those that don't know me.
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W. Curtis Preston: I'm W.
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Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
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Backup.
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And I've been deep in backup for over three decades.
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This podcast turns backup admins and to cyber recovery heroes.
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This is the backup wrap up.
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Welcome to the Backup wrap up.
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I'm your host W.
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Curtis Preston and I have with me a guy whose only relationship
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to the Silicon Valley Bank is that he used to get coffee there.
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Uh, Prasanna Malaiyandi how's it going?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Ah, I'm good, Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I, when all the news broke about Silicon Valley Bank, I was like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
wait, that name sounds so familiar.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I bet I know where they are.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, In one of my prior employments, uh, we were just down the street from them and in
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their headquarter location in Santa Clara.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's very interesting because in the center of it, there's
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like this coffee shop.
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And it's a standalone coffee shop and they're only open during some hours.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So some of us would walk down there, have coffee and come back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so when I heard the news about Silicon Valley Bank, I'm like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
wait, that sounds very familiar.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I went and like Google mapped it and looked it up and I was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
like, wait, I've been there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I've seen the people walking around in there having coffee.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I probably had coffee with similar people, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Some of the employees are Silicon Valley Bank.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So I was like, wow, that's uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: maybe you had coffee with the people that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
are now standing in line at svb.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, possibly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now I know because, but I'm guessing though, that a lot of their stuff
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was either online or over the phone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like how often, and here's a question for you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
How often do you actually go to a physical bank?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
When was the last time you went to a bank
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: well, I don't, but all I see on the news is are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
lines of people at svp, you know, and they're going and it's like, and it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
like founder after founder, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's like the c e o and they're like, yeah, I'm trying to get my money out.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You
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which is a little odd in this day and age of digital,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and even the fact that these are probably like startup founders, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
In tech and they're like, we're gonna go old fashioned and stand in line.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, the problem is digital doesn't work, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
In the current scenario, digital doesn't work.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So you go up and basically your choices are a wire transfer, um,
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cashier check, or a giant pile of cash.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I don't, I don't know if the giant pile of cash is actually,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
can you, can you imagine that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yes, I have a $1 million bill.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't think, surely you can't walk out with a giant pile of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I bet you Well, it, I don't think you can walk out
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that same day because it depends on how much cash they have on hand.
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And I don't know if banks actually keep that much cash on hand.
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But if you made such a large withdrawal, I'm sure if you called a
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day or two ahead, could you imagine walking out with like $10 million?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that was kind of a problem.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, or that was the problem in the, in the first place, right?
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Is a whole bunch of people.
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Asking for their money when, uh, it's funny, I just got, I just got
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a notification inside what Inside SVBs collapse that was, that's
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the New York Times notification.
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I just got, uh, may you live in interesting times, the
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old, uh, Chinese, uh, proverb.
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So in our continued, uh, backup to basic series, um, we are continuing to work.
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Uh, my current favorite book, uh, which is Modern Data Protection, my latest from
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O'Reilly, which, um, uh, you know, it, it's my fourth book and, um, we'll see,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we'll see if I got a fifth one in me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, there, there certainly is a topic floating around that's
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been very popular lately.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, uh, this chapter, what's that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, bank collapses.
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How not to have it run on the bank.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know, it's funny, the whole banking system is really built on sort of trust
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in that any bank can fail the way SVB did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If enough people come up and say they all want their money at once, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because every bank invests for the long term and Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, um, but anyway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't wanna talk about svb.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, um, by the way, we'll throw out our usual disclaimer, uh, Prasanna
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and I work for different companies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
He works for Zoom, I work for Druva.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, uh, this is not a podcast of either company and, um, The, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the opinions that you hear are ours.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So the, and also, please, uh, please rate us, uh, go to your
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favorite, uh, pod catcher.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Scroll down to where you can give us stars and, and tell us
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how wonderful you think we are.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, um, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And if you wanna watch us on video, go to
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Backup Central because we do post videos of all the episodes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: that's right on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
if you wanna see our lovely faces,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, you can actually see what we look like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and, uh, I wonder if the, my, if, if our viewers or listeners will have
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the same reaction with you as my family.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Did you remember when they first saw what you look like?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They were like, he doesn't look like, because they'd heard your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
voice so much and then, uh, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And then they saw you and they're like, oh, he didn't, he, he didn't match up to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
what I thought he was gonna look like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
boo.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I don't know, may, may, maybe they weren't expecting that beard.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
High expectations.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: high expectations.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, but anyway, so this week we're gonna talk about, um, you know, the
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book tries to cover all of, basically all the things you need to back up.
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All the ways that you can back up all the why's you need to back up and, uh,
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and all the wheres, right, so where, where you might want to back up.
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And the hows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and in the beginning here we're talking about the what's and uh, right
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now the chapter is about traditional data sources, some of which we still argue over
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whether or not they need to be backed up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I will, of
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Mainframes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I will of course say that I stand firmly on
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the ground of back up all the things, so you're not gonna hear it from me.
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Uh, there, there will be, there are some, some exceptions that
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I discuss in this chapter.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and we'll talk about 'em.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But the first section, uh, is about physical servers.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
What are those?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Do you think people actually know what physical servers are these days?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Well there, you know, I, you know, I, I was just on a call
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
yesterday with a Druva customer, or potential, a Druva, a prospect, and they
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were discussing, uh, they had a number of physical servers in their data center,
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even though they were mostly virtualized.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, you know, do you, do you see it, I mean, do you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, I'm just wondering as everyone's talking
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about cloud and compute list, right, functions running, do people even
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know like where, like what a physical server even is anymore, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or is it sort of, and this is probably more like the people currently entering
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the workforce more than sort of people who've been in the industry for a while.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because I'm sure most people haven't physically touched
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hardware, you know, in a long time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, it just depends on what, what generation, and by generation I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
don't mean people, I mean, Like the generation of, of the company, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
There are definitely companies like Druva where our entire, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we, we have a lot of compute, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And we have a lot of things that we do as a company, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you know, with thousands of customers and, and you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
know, thousand plus employees.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, obviously we have a need of a lot of stuff, but.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I don't know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I think we have a computer, like a server, and I don't know what it does.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, because I actually saw a server room at some point, but it was just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
really small and I don't, actually, don't, I think you know what it is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think it's, um, the only thing we have is actually it's lab equipment.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's, it's stuff, it's stuff pretending to be servers so that we can.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know, back that stuff up, you know, and demo and stuff like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But all our, our whole infrastructure is up in the cloud somewhere.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I think there's a lot of companies that are like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But for those of us that have worked at companies and continue to work
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
at companies where there's just some servers that, for one reason or another
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
they don't virtualize them, maybe they're not, um, maybe they're not.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Virtu liable, if I can make up a word.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
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either, probably due to either hardware specs or even just
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the fact that moving this to the cloud doesn't make sense for this application
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because there are too many other dependencies or it's just risk, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Every time you're migrating or moving a workload, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
There is risk involved in Sometimes it's like, Nope, we can't touch
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that, or we don't want to touch.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: And speaking of risc, uh, I'll spell it with a c.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, if you're using the risc architecture with a c, uh, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that's the salt, the sun architecture.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I still, I still call it sun.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, it would be Oracle now, but you know, if you're using
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
any of the older unixes, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, the IBM still is still, theirs is still going strong.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The, the.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A I X.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's still actively developed and released.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
HP's kind of dead.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Is Solaris still developed?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think it is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I think it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
well, I, well, and I just go back to the, so my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
dad, way back when he used to work at Tandem Computers, I don't know
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
if you remember that name, but they used to build like nonstop kernels.
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And so these super high availability systems used in government agencies,
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and those are still kicking around because no one wants to touch them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No one wants to upgrade them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So there's a variety of these, some of which are still in production.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Meaning, meaning production, meaning they're still being made.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Most of them are defunct, uh, but they're still running right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, with an uptime of.
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1700 days or whatever the way Linux used to be.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, there, there's sort of two, there's three different types
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of backups I talk about here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The standard backup, just a file system backup, uh, and then
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there's a bare metal backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now you said, you said something on the pre-call, you said
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you haven't really seen that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Not that I've seen that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think most folks, at least a newer generation, they don't like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I've always thought, okay, when.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So speaking personally, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So when I had my PC in college, right, what I would do is, okay, I back up my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
data and then when it came to sort of the OS and everything else, I literally
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would like start from scratch, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Every single time, just sort of okay, because for me, right?
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I didn't trust like all the programs that were there or
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things that might have changed.
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So I'm like, I'll just start from a clean slate and I had it down to a science.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like I would literally reinstall my entire system like once every three months.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Was that a, was that a window system?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that's, I, I didn't do it every three months, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
when I had Windows, I, I did that a lot.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I did the whole sort of refresh thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But when, when you're looking at a more complicated architecture, uh, there
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are a lot of reasons to, uh, basically back up the operating system itself.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And when you're doing that, you're not just backing up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
All the files in the operating system, you're potentially backing up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Basically the, the blocks that make up the, you know, the boot block
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and all of that kind of stuff.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, the, there, there's a couple of different ways to do that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And the idea is that if the hardware itself died, right, um, or you bought
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
new hardware, if you, if you just bought new hardware, as long as the, the OS was.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, you know, plug and play from a, from a new hardware perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You could just literally restore the old s the old os to the new hardware.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And it would just, it would just run right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And honestly, it, it worked pretty well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you know, and there are, there continued to be backup
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software products that still.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
In that way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, the, the thing is that it's gone by the wayside because of virtualization.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The one question I wanted to ask though is I don't think
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
people understand, just going back to one comment, you made the complexities right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Can you sort of walk through, and I know sometimes we talk about like bare metal
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backups and then I know we'll eventually talk about restores, but it's really
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the restore I'm interested in, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Without bare metal backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like how complex does restore get and like what are the benefits of doing a bare
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
metal backup from a restore or recovery
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, again, outside of the virtualization world, you basically have two choices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, you have three choices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You have the one that you described, which really doesn't
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work in the data center, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You, you, you have to, you have to like reload the os, reload all the
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applications, and then do all the configuration that you may have done to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
D o s and all the applications.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you could potentially restore a bunch of files if you were really good at it and
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knew exactly what you needed to restore to put all that configuration back in place.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, the second, and probably more common was the idea of maintaining an image.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right, you're gonna maintain a Solaris image and an a I X image
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and a, you know, a Linux image.
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And then you just, you lay down that image and that image isn't just the
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os, it's the OS configured the way you want it configured in your environment.
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So you would lay down that image and then you do a handful of
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customizations, like host name.
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That kind of stuff.
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Uh, and then it'd be off and running.
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And then the third would be you literally back up all of the bites and
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blocks, uh, that, you know, comprise
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a specific machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: for each specific machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And then what you need is you need to boot a mini root.
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Uh, basically you, you know, you need to, cuz you need to restore to a
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drive that you're not currently using.
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So you boot a mini root.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, basically, you know, sometimes different oss work differently,
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but like with Windows you could restore really basic.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, mini root, and then you'd boot into that, and then you'd
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do the restore of the drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, it gets really complicated.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, but the idea is that, um, and, and it's one of the reasons why I
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think that it, it went by the wayside and the fact that virtualization came
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out, but, um, it's really complicated.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't think I wanna do that ever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: No.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, well, um, but you know what, uh, time machine is a bare metal backup,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because it puts back everything.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you know, it puts back the whole thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, the other thing I had under physical service B was backing up,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
NAS, there was a time, uh, shoutout to Steven Manley Druva's CTO.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
There was a time when I was a big fan of N D P, the network.
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data management protocol, which was the only way, cuz I didn't like
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backing up NAS servers via NFS and S and B, because you're competing for
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the U, you're competing with the users for the resources of the machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And then within DMP it could deprioritize the backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, you know, under the priority of the users.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, you know, without going into it too much, there, there were, there are a lot
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of problems with N DM p, the, the chief of them being that it's platform dependent,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
meaning that if you back up a NetApp, that backup only works on a NetApp.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
For some vendors, I would say for some backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
vendors, not all have that limitation.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I think I'm gonna have to argue with you because the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
format comes from the platform.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So if, if I recall, yes, it does come from the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
platform, but there are some products which can reverse engineer and actually
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
write out to a different target.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
All right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So there are some backup products that that basically extrapolate some
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Very few.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But it can't export out and restore everything back perfectly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because like you said, if one vendor supports some attributes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
cuz each vendor is unique, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Another vendor, you may not be able to get that same access.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So it will try, it'll at least get you back your data, but it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
not guaranteed all the metadata associated with it matches or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
apples and other things like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: So what most people do is they, they mount the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
NAS device, uh, to some kind of proxy and they back it up that way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, so, and.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know, and honestly, especially if you've gone to an incremental
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
forever approach, uh, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Back in the day when we were doing a, a mixture of full and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
incrementals, maybe you're having a bigger impact on the filer.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, um, all right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The next we have is virtual servers.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, so the world of virtualization, the likes of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Hyper V, uh, a H v, kvm, all of these things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, uh, I'm gonna wax, uh, historical here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Back in the day, the only thing we could do was VM level backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Basically, you put an agent in the vm, you backed up the vm just like it was a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
virtual machine, and it was a horrible, if any of you're still out there doing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Sorry, can you restate that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You said you put an agent in the VM and you back up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: VM as if it were a physical machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Oh, sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I thought you said virtual machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
My bad.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: No.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
As if it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: a physical machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, maybe at least that's what I thought I said anyway,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: so, um, and, and if you're still doing fulls
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and incrementals in VMs, stop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's just, I don't know why anyone would st It was horrible
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
from a architecture standpoint.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It beat the crap out of the virtualization box.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: did you, did you deal with that anywhere where you worked?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So one of my former employers, uh, was very big on VMware
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Mm-hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
so, um, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Luckily, they were smart enough to not do that, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
To do sort of throw an agent into a VM and back it up like a physical server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so at least when I joined, I wasn't there as part of the initial wave towards
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
figuring out how to back up VMware.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
By the time I was there, they were already doing smarter things, which you'll talk
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
about in a second for backing up VMs because yeah, whenever I thought about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it, I'm like, why would you ever back it up like a normal physical server?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That makes no
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: because back then we had, we, well, we had no choice, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, virtualization broke back up overnight, uh, and we
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you like to talk about that's like, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, the, you know, we had to do things like spread the fulls out across the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
month, spread the, in the cumulative incrementals out across the week, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
then do a nightly incremental, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because just going back to the, what you were
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
talking about of sort of like the NAS and the N D M P case, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
With VMware it's a lot worse because if you're backing up one vm, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
could potentially impact all of the other virtual machines running
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
on that same ESX host, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If you, if you don't spread the load out, because the full backup is quite, is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
quite a, a, a knock on a, on a vm, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So if you're, if you're doing a bunch of full backups at the same time on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the same physical server, you're, you know, it's not gonna be good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: It's gonna be a little traffic jam.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and then, um, we started getting this, like, this idea of specialized
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backups for hypervisors, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So that you could back up at the hypervisor level, right at the VMware
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
level, at the, you know, hyper V level and you could back up the, the VMs as files.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, there is one crucial.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Piece of technology that is required for that to work with Windows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Do you know what that techno piece of technology would be?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
VSS.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Vss.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So that is Windows Volume Shadow Services.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You want to talk about that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, so think of it like Microsoft's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
snapshotting technology, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Which it pretty much is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's just not the normal way that you would think about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
designing snapshots, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, in how once you take a snapshot, Data sort of gets split differently and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
merging 'em back together is a little odd.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's not like what you would think when you think about like hardware snapshots.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so there are a lot of implications with using vss snapshots.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I would say the one that I commonly ran across was when they designed the VSS
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
protocol, you basically had to complete a snapshot within a certain amount of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
depending on the system, right, because depending
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
on also like how many layers, if it was a software snapshot or a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
hardware based snapshot, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It could take more than that amount of time, which means that your snapshots
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
start failing and as backup, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You want to take a snapshot first, so you have a stable point in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
time before you do your backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You now started to get backup failures, which were painful.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, they were, uh, but basically what, what it allowed us to do in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the, in the, the thing about vss is that it could be, it, it had APIs
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
so that you could call those APIs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so VMware and Hyper B and these other virtualization products, they
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
could call that API and say, Hey, make a snapshot, and then we're
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
gonna back up that snapshot, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So you can back up the, the VM externally.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, um, uh, while still getting a stable, consistent image, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that was the whole point of v s s.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Is coffee gonna be okay?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm very concerned for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Okay, come here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Okay, come.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Come
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: There you go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
now.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
He's fine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I, I could hear him down there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I was like, poor, please get poor coffee.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, he sounded so sad.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, but yeah, that, so that's basically, you know, if you're
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backing up virtualization, you know, or or virtualized servers,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you need to back them up in the way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That platform likes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and you need, you still, I think you need to be doing incremental,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
forever approaches, deduplication approaches so that you minimize the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
impact on the physical server that's hosting all that, uh, all those VMs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I have a question for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, sure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Was V s s the first time you've heard of a vendor
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
enabling backups to be better?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I know we talked about N D M P, but from like a operating system
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
software side of the house.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, certainly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, well, no, cuz I've been around a while.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, that's why I was asking.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: the oddly the, the one that actually jumps out at me.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Was, makes this B from a i X.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
What makes this B was we'd go back to bare metal backup makes
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
B was time machine for ax, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So it was a, a complete backup of the operating system and everything on it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
To a tape, which if you had the tape driving the tape and you had
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a completely brand new server you could restore, that makes the speed
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
directly to the OS and restore it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, I, I can think of that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I can think of that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but this was the one, this was one that was, This was useful for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a lot of other purposes, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
For orchestration.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and it also works with applications because not only does
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it take a snapshot of the operating system, it takes a snapshot of any
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
VSS compliant, uh, applications.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
See, obviously all of the Microsoft apps, but Oracle as VSS compliant
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
as well, uh, and other, uh, databases that might run on Windows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
which is what you want because you want those
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
applications to be consistent when you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly, exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Otherwise, you're backing up a file that's changing as you're
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backing it up and that's no good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: So the next we have is desktops and laptops.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and this is, this is what I was referring to earlier when I was saying
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that we're gonna argue over whether or not you and I, but you know, whether
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
or not these need to be backed up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and I, I come down strongly on the back up, all the things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Um, what do you, what, what have you run into?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
People talking about backing up their laptops out there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I have, I think, What you end up seeing is a lot of people
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
are like, why would I need to back it up?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Especially when you're using all these SaaS services like Microsoft
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
365 Google Workspaces, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
How much, and I get the point because it's like how much data actually
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
sits on your laptop these days?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
However, there are scenarios like you're offline for some reason.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like right now in California, we just got hit with an atmospheric river.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
There's a bunch of power outage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
In the area, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Which means no internet connectivity.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If you have to work or if you're doing offline editing, that's great, but that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
data's sitting on your laptop, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so if that's important, you need to make sure you back it up, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
One of the things, you go back to Curtis, it's like, if it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
important to you, back it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The funny thing is that, um, well, yeah, so that's really what comes down to is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
do you ever create data on your laptop that only sits on your laptop, or, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
by the way, um, the next thing we're gonna talk about is mobile devices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, And if you do so I do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I make this podcast, um, and, uh, and I write.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, um, I, um, there is, although, and I write by voice, uh, you know, dictation.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So for a brief period of time, all of the words of a particular chapter are.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
On, not just my laptop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's funny, my laptop here, over to my right here is my Windows laptop that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I use just for voice dictation because Dragon, uh, for some reason decided to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
give up the, uh, the Macintosh market.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but I've never, I haven't said the full word Macintosh at all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Macin
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I dunno why I said that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, um, yeah, so for, for a brief period of time, Any
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
given chapter is sitting only on that device, and it would suck.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If I lost that chapter right, um, there are people who create, and, and I,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and when I'm producing these podcasts right as I'm producing the podcast,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
various pieces of that podcast exist only on this laptop I don't use.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So interestingly enough, interestingly enough, I now use.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A sassy, it's not fully sass, but it is a sa now that I'm thinking about it, the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
script, which is the tool that I used to edit my podcast, which I love, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I really do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but the way it works is that as soon as you load files, as soon as you load
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the source files into script, they're immediately uploaded to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: on a local copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but it, but it's, it's immediately synchronizing, uh, the, the both
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the source files as well as all of your edits to the cloud so that,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
um, uh, and then it's, um, and it's maintaining a cache of that locally.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Um, and so it's, it's kind of sassy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
but the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: like if you have, if you have a product like that,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
then maybe, maybe you don't have to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If that's the only thing you have, you might not have to back up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
but the question is, do they back up the stuff on their side?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: That is a really good question, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
questions about SaaS.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, so, um, Which is why I do what I do, which is like I have a local copy of all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of the pieces that go into the podcast.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I don't have, because I don't have a copy of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you also have the raw too,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I have the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you also have the raw stuffers.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: have the raw stuff.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a long time to recover if you had to do that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I would have to kind of re-edit
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
an episode if I had to do that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, um, well, it, so first off, a number of things
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
would have to happen, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So the, the, the SaaS service would have to go down
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Your laptop
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I would need to edit a past.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Which I almost have never done, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If I do, it happens within a day or two.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It happened this week, oddly enough, uh, because I was editing, I was editing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
late at night and I messed up the intro.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
For those of you that are listeners, you heard a weird intro.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You're, the music didn't match.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It was a weird, uh, I figured that out as I was listening to it later
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and I was like, oh, I gotta fix it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So I had to go back and re-edit the, the podcast, but that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
was five minutes worth of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Monday
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Because I was already there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, and then I fixed it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, but I'm not going back and editing a podcast from two months ago.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But anyway, this is, this is definitely an edge case, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, and I know you're talking about podcasts, but the other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
thing, like I think a lot of people have is like they're pictures.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like I have, I take pictures where I used to take pictures, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I don't use any SaaS service for editing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't use Lightroom in the cloud or iCloud photos or whatever else, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I do everything on my laptop, and so those pictures I never wanna lose.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So I back that stuff up four times.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm a little crazy, but I have four copies sitting in various places.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, uh, uh, we'll get to mobile devices next.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, let me, but let me give, let me give a scenario of one of where I said
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
in the book where I said, okay, I'm gonna concede the point on this one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And that is, um, Chromebooks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Chromebooks are nothing more than a cache for what's in Google.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and so there's nothing that should ever be on the Chromebook
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
other than just the late most recent synchronized changes, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, I, I, you know, you can use it offline and then synchronized changes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
but honestly, if you were offline, you wouldn't be able to back it up anyway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I would say that listeners should wait till we get to the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
chapter on SaaS services, where we talk about what you need to do on that site.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, definitely,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So it's not that you, it eliminates the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
need to worry about backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's just you don't need to back up your desktop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and then we talk about mobile devices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
This one, uh, you know, and I'm, I'm gonna say that I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I am not compliant, uh, in this regard because I am trusting iCloud photos,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and this is one of those things where I really have to look into this
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and I need to see if there we can come up with a solution for this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because the beauty of the way the iPhone works and the way iCloud photos is that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
iCloud maintains the high res copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
master.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right, and then on my phone is like the low res copy,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and I only get the high res copy if I like actually start using a photo.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I get it automatically, but there's no way that I can find yet, um, to,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to get all of those high res photos out easily and store them someplace.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Can.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Interesting.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Um, but, but, but this, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
submit this as a, as a thing where I'm not doing the right thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Okay?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and I am trusting Apple far too much now.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I am paying for them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I am paying for them to store this data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, you know, but the data, the photos that matter to me are only in one place.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Bad Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Bad.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The high res versions of these photos are only, and videos are only in one place.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Mainly it would be the really cool videos of my granddaughter,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Lily, that I would miss.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But still, you should figure out how to at least pull that data down
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to a laptop, so then you can then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I, I've, I've looked into it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I, I've looked into it and I, I don't wanna spend too much time
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
talking about here, but I've looked into it before and, and, and I think
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
then I got busy with other things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but, uh, And, and I really do need to come up with it, with a solution, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I need to bring, um, need to bring our friend, uh, Daniel on, uh, for that one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, um, but the, the, the point that I want to make is that iCloud photos being
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
an exception here, if your device that you're holding is, is basically one of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
two copies, um, You know, you that, that basically the cloud maintains a backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
copy of your phone and you maintain a copy of your phone and the, and the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
cloud has the ability to, here's a big, here's a big if, if the cloud I, if you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
go into your phone and you basically delete all your photos, is there any
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
way to get those back on the cloud?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, cuz that's mainly what we're talking about, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's photos.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, in your email, you're basically, you're just a cash of the, um, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think messages work the same way as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Lisa, if you're using iMessage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, and the other, yeah, the other thing, well, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, It, it, it gets, it gets more complicated when we start talking
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
about consumer personal devices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If, if you're, if you're a, a, uh, a commercial user, you can,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
there, there are services, Druva backs up, uh, mobile devices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It backs up the iPhone, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but we can only back up, and by we, I mean any vendors that do this, we can only
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
back up what the OS vendor allows us to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Uh, which on the iPhone means pretty much only Apple
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a whole lot.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like, like, um, like if there was a des on the iPhone, is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
there a script on the iPhone?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I dunno if there was a script on the iPhone, like I couldn't back
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
up its data because that's just the way, it's a security feature.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And even WhatsApp is the same, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You have to use WhatsApp's Cloud backup where it'll sync the data to some data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
source you get, you tell it to, but you can't use it through a centralized place
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to backup everything on your iPhone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Although, I do wonder what happens when you do a physical
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backup using a lightning cable in iTunes?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Are you talking Are, are you back to photos?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No, no, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Just in general.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So I can load iTunes, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I could say backup my phone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think it does capture all that data though, so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: does.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It doesn't solve my photo problem though,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No, it doesn't solve well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: because my phone doesn't have the, the high res copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I wi here's what I wish, I wish there was a cloud service
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that I could pay that would be able to export my high res photos out of, uh, I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And just back it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I pay for that service, but they don't make it available.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They don't make those, um, the high res copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think I can sync them to my laptop, but then I need, I need a lot of storage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I have, I have no idea how many terabytes
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of photos I have up in iCloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I know for a fact that I would need a separate drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: but, but basically, so regarding mobile
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
devices, my opinion is the same.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If you're creating data on these devices that is important to you, and it's only
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
on that device or only in the cloud, uh, you should back up that data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And yes, I, I know, I know I need to listen to my own, my own
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
advice regarding the, the photos.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, But if this is corporate data, uh, you get, you get no, you get no grace.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I can think of, I worked with an engineering company in St.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Louis, um, and, uh, they, they basically, they would send
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
people out into the field with.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
iPads and they would take pictures of jobs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Those, you know, those were photos that needed to be backed up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Those were corporate data that existed only in those tablets
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and only in those accounts.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, so you would have to, anyway, I, I don't want to, I don't want to, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
my point is, if it's data that's being created and is, it exists only in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
one place, it needs to be backed up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And it's important to you?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: And it's important to you, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If it's data that doesn't matter.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I just dunno what that data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Don't back it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Is there data that doesn't matter?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, I was thinking.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like if you didn't care about like random pictures you're taking or if
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you're taking, say, a picture of a document just for convenience sake,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to someone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If you're only using it to send the, you know, you take the picture and then you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
send it to the other person and they're the recipient of the picture, then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that document doesn't matter anymore.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, there is this concept, by the way that I mentioned in here of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
mobile device management, which you really should think about.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So if you're, so it's very common as I do, it's very common to use your.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Cell phone at work.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's very common for companies not to buy, uh, mobile phones anymore.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But if, um, if you are concerned about the security implications of that, that's what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
mobile device management is for, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You c
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And it's corporate data, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You wanna make sure that if something happens to the phone, like it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
lost or whatever else, you could protect your corporate data and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
remote wipe the device, et cetera.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and it also, it also creates like a, like almost, I don't know, it's like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a virtu, it's like a vpc, you know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, inside the phone, A sandbox.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's a better, that's a better term.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Creates a sandbox in the phone where you can put corporate apps.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, yeah, exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and you can make your own rules.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, Back up, all the things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I'm gonna pull, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the last page in the chapter
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
cuz I've, I've got final thoughts in the chapter and I wonder what I said.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think it is really, and here's the thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I know we talked about if it's important, back it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think the flip side is if you don't know what data is important
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
or not, back up everything.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
safe than sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
What I, what I did mention here is that some companies are adopting
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a sync and share tool as their backup method for their laptops.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I did mention in the, in the, um, in the chapter that,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that that was a bad idea.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, if it's corporate data and I can, basically, the problem with
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
sync and share is if I delete it on my laptop, I delete it in the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, if, if you've got a solution for that particular problem, a good
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
solution to be able to restore that customer's account, that user's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
account, and my laptop, back to the way it looked before something happened.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because now what we're talking about is things like ransomware, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Sync and share is a great way to put ransomware in the cloud, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you know, encrypt all those stuff on your, on your desktop and then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
your encrypt, and then it's just gonna synchronize it up, up to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Now, here's a question.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I know we'll probably talk about it in the SaaS chapter, but for that sync and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
share solution, if they were taking copies of those, the data that existed in the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
cloud backups of the data that existed in the cloud, would that change your mind?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Um, if you could, yeah, I, I think in general.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
In general, yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But in general, what I'm finding is that's not the point.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No, yeah, exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No one's really doing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: they're saying, they're saying, well, we're
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
trying to save money, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so we're not gonna back up laptops.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We're just gonna use OneDrive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, you're backing up OneDrive, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, no, because it's Microsoft and it's a SaaS service.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You're wrong.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You're just plain wrong.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Just Google the Microsoft.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Shared responsibility model.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Read the page, the information and data, your responsibility, not theirs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's plain as day on their website.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So stop telling me that you don't need to back up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, OneDrive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but um, yeah, so, so yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, so to go back to your question though, if you're backing up, Um, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
know, the cloud that you're syncing to, to something else, then, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
maybe I would withdraw my objection.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, well, I, I withdraw my objection.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I just, it's maybe I might have a different objection.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: but, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it's just how it's being implemented would be the question.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, would we get all the data?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Obviously there's a potential of data loss there depending on how well the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
synchronization is happening because here's my problem with OneDrive,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
specifically OneDrive, is that there are no global controls over how
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
synchronization works or if it works.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So there's no, there's no console that says all of my users are sync.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's, to me as a, as a practitioner, that's terrifying.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so this goes back to your question.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So it, you're still relying on the synchronization process of OneDrive,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
which for the record can be de can be deactivated by any user at any time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And not only can it be deactivated, and I've heard that you can deactivate
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that ability, if I've heard you can turn on off that ability.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They just have to like, not connect to the internet.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They could connect to the internet for a long time or not connect to 365, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or whatever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, the, the, the fact that there's no global view for me to see that everybody
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
is syncing and then for me to notice, oh, Prasanna hasn't synced in a week.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
What's, what's, what's going on?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Prasanna?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you're like, oh, well my network card died.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Oh, well perhaps we should get you a new network
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
fix that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, my, my home internet went out because I live in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the Bay Area and we've been having background, little, little, little bit
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of a rain up there and down here as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It was raining quite a bit this morning.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
How's the weather right
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
more than the rain was, it's nice and sunny.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or it was sunny.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now it's overcast, but no rain until next week.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But yeah, I think it was a 50 mile per hour gusts yesterday
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that sort of did a lot of things or brought a lot of things down.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Speaking of the 50 mile per hour gust, uh, I believe that you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
solved our blueberry, uh, mystery as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, remember I was saying that I had these blueberry
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Oh, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: over my, all over both cars and all over the driveway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, we looked, and they're not actual blueberries, but they're blueberries.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're not blueberries.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, but yeah, the neighbor, the neighbor house over has a tree.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
With little blueberries in it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so it must have been the gusts, all the gusts that we had, they must have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
just been blown over and we just were the unfortunate recipients of all of those.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They just went everywhere.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And it was like, what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
At first we thought they were birds, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But it was like, man did an entire flock of birds at eight
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
berries just fly over our house.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Anyway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Absolutely.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
All right, well thanks, uh, thanks again, Prasanna for chatting
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
about our favorite subject.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Thank you for educating me on or enlighten
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
me on bare metal restores.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
See, I learn something
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: back in the day, um, yeah, we used to do, I used
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to do, do you remember ZIP drives?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so I used to do a bare metal backup of my Linux laptop,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and we could do it with windows too, uh, of, of the, of an Intel based laptop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, with zip drive, basically you would, you would boot, you would boot.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You needed a floppy, you needed a floppy, you would boot, you had a mini route
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that was on the floppy, like Tom's, Archie, bt, you remember that one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you would boot, you would put that on the floppy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You'd boot to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The zip drive would have, you could read the zip drive, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and you would actually use dd.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You would use DD to, to, which
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
bring the data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I don't know what Didi stood for.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Direct disk.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, it was a Unix command and you could do it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Basically it was a block to block copy of the drive and you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
created a file on the zip drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And that's how I used to do Bemo on my laptops back in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the day, uh, back in the day.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
ATR2500x-USB Microphone & Logitech BRIO-1: Thanks for joining us for this rebroadcast
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of a classic episode from last year.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I hope you have a great year.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's a wrap.
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