Choosing the Best Cloud Backup for Your Small Business

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

backup recovery and cyber recovery.

In this episode, we tackle the questions every small business needs

to ask when choosing a cloud backup solution, picking the wrong backup

product can cost you big time, both in terms of money and lost data.

We're going to cut through the marketing noise and give you.

Real practical advice about what matters immutability that actually works.

Following the 3, 2, 1 rule and making sure that you don't get killed by hidden costs.

Persona and I break down exactly what you need to look for.

What to avoid and why Cloud backup makes so much sense for most small businesses.

Whether you're shopping for backup right now or just want to make sure

that your current solution is solid, this episode should be a big help.

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

Backup, and I've been passionate about backup and recovery for over 30 years.

Ever since.

I had to tell my boss that there were no backups of the production

database that we had just lost.

I don't want that to happen to you, and that's why I do this podcast.

On this podcast, we turn unappreciated backup admins into Cyber Recovery Heroes.

This is the backup wrap up.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, I'm w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr.

Backup, and I have with me a guy who wishes that he had my television

Prasanna Malaiyandi, how's it going?

Prasanna.

I am good Curtis and.

I don't know.

I don't think, I wish I had your television.

you do.

I think you do.

You secretly, you don't want to tell me how bad you want my television.

if I had the room for a TV that big.

Yes.

You don't have room for a 98 inch

No.

Curtis

got a new toy for Christmas.

I did.

Curtis bought himself a new toy for Christmas.

Let's face it, Curtis saw this and you know, the whole story is just crazy.

I won't even,

won't even tell.

What's funny is literally the, I have a history of buying stuff that's

big and not fully planning it out.

This was possibly the best executed.

Of all of the things, because I thought about how bad some of the other ones

went, but it, but the, and the idea was to get it up on the wall, get it

mounted on, on an articulating mount, by the way, 'cause it's a hundred pounds.

To get it on a fully articulating mount, that would allow me to like.

Angle it and stuff.

Um, which for the record, the mount, just the mount itself, uh, is called the Beast.

Um, and it was 200 bucks for the Mount.

And, um, I.

To, to get it on that mount and, and and functioning and get the wall repaired.

'cause the wall had a previous thing in there.

Get the wall repaired before my wife gets back because she was, um, at her mother's.

And so that whole plan ob it went flawlessly.

Like, I, like I, I prepped the wall.

I, you know, I studded out the wall 'cause it had a big hole in

it before I restudied the wall.

I got the drywall guy in there, the drywall guy.

Got the drywall going and I got it painted.

I actually planned ahead with a person to borrow their truck

and another person to help me

I

know I was actually impressed at how much thought went into this.

Yeah.

And then I, um, because time was of the essence.

My wife was coming back like the next day.

And, um, and I, and not that like.

Well, my plan was just, oh look.

Oh, there's television, there's a new, that was the plan and

everything was fine up until what?

You hung the TV and realized it doesn't work.

Yeah, so the new TV didn't turn on after we hung it.

Um, and

so.

it was not anything in your control,

No.

Yeah.

Not anything in my control.

It was, it was DOA, never even thought perhaps I should turn

it on before I try to hang it.

And, uh, in fact, the second one, we didn't try to turn

it on before we hung it.

Right.

Um, and, uh, so

And not only did you

not try it before you hung it, you also tossed all the packaging

I did because the, the easiest way to get a hundred inch screen or a hundred

inch monitor out is to chop the box up.

Right.

To slice it down the side.

'cause it's not like you're gonna lift it up out of a box the

way you know, you normal boxes.

Right.

Um, yeah.

So I did, I, I I sliced the hell outta that box.

So the box was destroyed and everything.

Yeah.

Um, and um, so I went and got another TV

and, and I was going to keep the box, uh, and then I was going to um, uh, and then

again do the, do the swappy swap again.

Arrange for the, the truck, arrange for the helper and, uh.

Everything was fine until my wife called me in the midst of this saying that she

was coming back up in the morning versus in the evening, and so she walked in

on us mounting this gigantic TV during which I got exactly what I expected,

which is, do you know what you're doing?

Which, which is just what you want to hear when you're holding a a

hundred inch tv, which you have to hold in order to mount it properly.

Like it has to be lifted like beyond shoulder

Yeah.

Um, and it's a hundred pounds.

Um, yeah.

So it

and so you don't

And it's top.

Yeah.

All the things.

All the things, yeah.

Um,

but

it's up.

and the so

but it's up and it's

so, so I think, here's what everyone wants to know.

yeah,

it.

it's amazing.

It's, it's, um, I, I should put, I, I, did you see the, did you see

the thing I sent you this morning?

Yeah, I should put that up.

This is how much bigger the TV is versus my, the previous tv and which

I've always thought was a 65 inch, 'cause I bought it used and now it

turns out it was actually 58 inch.

And so how much bigger is a 50 a 98 than a 58?

It turns out it's much, much, much, much more screen Right.

And um.

And also I have a Samsung Q nine 90 soundbar, which is a really good soundbar.

And so the connection of those two things is just an amazing

home theatrical experience.

But, uh, anyway, like I said, you wish you had my

Yes, Yes, I do wish.

Um, so the topic of today, uh, and, and by the way, um, I'll just tell you

if, if you're looking for me, if you're looking for me to just name companies,

it's not gonna be, that is not gonna be the way this podcast is gonna go.

That's generally not what we do.

Um, it's going to be.

How, what are the types of things that you're going to be looking for

if you're a small business and you, um, uh, need a cloud backup company?

And yes, both of you, both you and I used to work for a cloud

backup company, but this is not going to be, hey, um, you know,

just pick that one right?

But there are things that you need to think about.

And I first.

Wanted to start with the question.

So I am of the opinion, and I think you share this opinion, but I

wanted to talk about that opinion.

I am of the opinion that cloud backup, a cloud backup service is

the way to back up a small business.

Or, or a person, right?

Uh, versus the, the alternative versus buying a, you know, a backup product,

installing it on your, uh, a machine of some type or a vm if you're,

you're in the cloud versus doing

can we clarify slightly?

you can clarify all you want.

Uh, so I think in many cases, I think it depends what your workload

is and where you're running it.

So I, I will preface my statement, assuming it, it can

meet your requirements, then cloud backup is the way to go.

yes, and I agree with that.

And the only other thing I want to also clarify is you said downloading,

installing on your device.

I think there's still a use for that.

It may not be managing the backup service and everything else that I a hundred

percent agree should move to the cloud, but there still may be things that you

are installing locally onto your device in order to be able to back up that device.

R Right, I meant, I meant like installing backup software on a server.

That's now your backup server, right?

That basically what I did for the first half of my career, right?

Helping people to install a product.

Well, a company that is now no more as of last week, right?

Veritas?

I did, I installed a lot of Veritas.

NetBackup is still around, but, but, um, and backup exec is still around, but it's

but I

think, I think it's important though to also point out that back in those days,

the workloads that a small medium, a small business was running is very different

than the technologies and what's available today and how they operate their business.

I'll kind of agree with that.

I'll, I'll, I'll say, I'll say, how's this?

I'll say it in a slightly different way because all those

workloads are still there.

Yeah.

They're operating differently.

Well, and even if, like, it depends on how far we go back.

Obviously virtualization changed a lot, but the cloud.

It changed a ton, right?

The, the existence of the cloud as a place to put your IT and as a place to buy it.

Services.

The existence of SaaS changes everything, right?

Um, even more so, it changes everything in the backup world, even more so than

the creation of the cloud as we know it.

The basically cloud computing.

And then I think the other important, sorry, I keep going on about this is,

um, when you say cloud though, you don't necessarily mean just public cloud, right?

You could also be referring to like an MSP who is providing

A call, well, a cloud backup service.

I,

I would still call that a cloud backup service.

An MSP.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm good

I mean, it might, A cloud backup service might not be running in what

we think of as the public cloud.

It could be running in a private cloud.

But I think the key takeaway is you're not managing the backup infrastructure.

You're not deploying it.

You're someone else is managing all of that for you,

Right.

And why do I think that?

because no one

Why do I think that the cloud is the way that a cloud backup service

is the way to back up, especially a small business or an individual?

Well a lot of it is just all those, like that use case of small businesses and

individuals need to back up their data.

If they have to deploy all the infrastructure, they're gonna cut

corners or they're gonna leave things out, or the cost is gonna

be extremely high that they're just gonna be like, Hey, I can't do this.

Yeah, so creating and ins, you know, you know, designing and

installing and configuring, and then managing a proper backup system.

I.

Whether on-prem or running in a cloud instance in your cloud account is a lot,

Yep.

right?

I built an entire career out of it.

People misconfigure that stuff a lot.

They, they often, they often over-engineer.

They have, they either have way more hardware than they need or

way less hardware than they need.

Right.

Um, also it's difficult to design it to be properly secure.

It's very easy to design it in a way that it's easily attackable.

Um, and we can talk about that for a minute because that's really the,

it used to be that the number one problem was I got this much data and

I got this much time, and I can't get a, I can't get from A to B.

That was the number one thing.

Both either from the backup or the restore.

What were you about to say?

Oh, physics.

Yes.

Physics.

Physics, I used to say it all the time, physics was my number one enemy.

And the problem with physics is it doesn't, it doesn't argue like, it's

like, Hey man, I'm physics right?

Um, like I, I just, I just had a thought.

It was a company that is not around anymore, but they were one of

the.com companies back in the day

Hmm.

and, um, they were having real trouble backing up.

Something and they're like, the thing's over here and we're

trying to get it over here.

And I was like, just curious, what's the pipe?

Right?

And it was, and it was going across the internet.

I'm like, what's, what's the pipe?

They're like, oh, we have a, um.

It was a, uh, a fractional T one line, and I just remember doing the math.

I'm like, yeah, well this is physics.

The problem is physics.

You can't get from there to here with that much, that much data and that that little

bit of pipe that used to be the problem.

I think that problem has been solved primarily by a lot of

design changes in backup software.

Number one being deduplication, right?

That deduplication changed it.

It didn't change the laws of physics, but it addressed the laws of physics,

but allowing you to back up a much bigger amount of data over a much smaller pipe,

right?

Dedupe and progre and basically progressive incrementals.

What were you about to

That the, the second part was what I was gonna say as well, that improvements

in the technologies that allow you to do backups more efficiently.

Yeah.

Right.

I think also goes a long way even without deduplication, because that does help.

But I think like, uh.

Incremental backups, whatever method you want to pick.

Synthetic or nonsynthetic, right?

Take your pick.

But

all of those, I think, significantly helped in improving backup performance.

Yeah, I guess when I think of ddu, I think of DDU as the method to

create the incremental backups.

But you're right, right.

It's a, it's a combination of the fact that we're able to do incremental

forever now without restore forever.

That, you know, there incremental forever has been around for a while.

Um, and you know, there, there have been products that do incremental

forever and they did it to tape.

An incremental forever to tape means restore forever from tape

because you're gonna load so many.

I remember doing a restore, uh, with an incremental forever product.

And, uh, it was like, gosh, it wasn't even that much data.

It was, I, I don't remember the actual numbers, but I remember

thinking this should take a few hours.

And it took a few weeks because, uh, we were, um, you know, uh,

doing, uh, restore forever.

I just remember that that restore was because the number of tapes we had to

load and the fact that we only needed one file from this tape and two files

from that tape, you know, that, that I never thought that was a good idea.

But, now where we have disc primarily as the, you know, the, the backup medium.

We have dedupe as a helper.

The fact that, you know, we can back up really, really large amounts of

data, the only thing then we need to design is we need to make sure we

figure in the restore aspect of it.

Because just because we can back up, you know, a petabyte over the

internet doesn't mean we can restore a petabyte over the internet.

Right.

Yeah.

And

Um, go ahead.

what, I know you were talking about sort of backing up data, right?

And pushing it out.

But I think also now for a lot of small businesses and individuals,

they're leveraging, like we talked earlier, a lot of SaaS services,

Yeah.

they're not even running exchange on premises or

right.

They don't have the,

premises.

yeah, they don't have the same reasons that we did that we had back in the day.

So let's.

So, yeah, so basically I think it's a good idea.

I think it's a good idea.

From a cost perspective, I think it's a good idea.

From a risk perspective, from a cybersecurity perspective, um, I

think that you are, you are leveraging that company's, uh, expertise and

then literally all you have to do is install the agent, right?

Or some, and some are even agentless, right?

But all you have to install is agent or, or connect.

The, you know, the appropriate connector and they are specialists

in how to back up that thing.

And, um, you just need to allow it to do its job in most cases, right?

Um, you just need to basically get out of its way and say things like

how often you want to back it up.

Um,

do you wanna keep it

um, you know, what kind of RTO and RPO you're expecting, that sort of thing.

So I, so I just think it's a good idea.

So, so what would you think if, if I'm a small business, um, and I will add,

um, if I'm a dude in the house with, you know, a handful of computers, what,

what's the first thing that I need to, if I'm, if I'm wanting to narrow down?

List of, you know, because I, I googled cloud backup companies for

small business and, and there's, you know, I dunno, 50 of 'em out there.

How do I narrow that list down from 50 to a handful.

I think one of 'em is, do they actually back up the applications or the workloads

that you are looking to support?

Yeah, there's no point in having a conversation about how awesome their

backup is if they don't back up your Mac or they don't back up your Microsoft

365 or VMware or whatever it is that you use as a, you know, as a platform.

If they don't support it, there is really no point in having a conversation because

what I, what I really want you as a small business, what I really want you to avoid.

Is this, I did a LinkedIn survey last week or two weeks ago that that

just finished a couple days ago.

And it was, how many backup products are you using in your

72.

72.

And I, um, I was just looking at it.

30% of the respondents said three or more, 12% of the environments said four or more.

Right.

So 38% said one so good on them.

Right?

And,

62% said more than one backup product.

Why?

Why do I care?

Why do I not want you to run more than one backup product?

Well, as a small business, you probably don't have the time

to understand how to operate 20 different backup products when you

have a thousand other things to do,

and learning each one.

Being an expert takes time.

So pick what works.

Which, what would support most of your environment

Yeah.

And what, and again, I, I'll, I, I, I make a lot of blanket

statements and this is one of them.

I would rather you have a not as amazing backup product that

handles all your platforms than two really amazing products that, that

handle all your platforms, right?

Uh, just my Prasannal preference because of risk and complexity

and all of that stuff.

Standpoint.

Now, again, I go back with, as long as the product meets your requirements, right?

Um, if it can't do the job, that's a different discussion, but I'm just saying.

Too many times we pick that product and this product because they have really

cool features that aren't requirements.

Right.

They're like, man, this one also makes my morning espresso.

That would be amazing.

Right?

And you're like, that's not really a requirement.

Right?

Um, and so I would rather you buy one decent backup product

that meets all your requirements.

I would never want you to buy a product that doesn't match your requirements.

But yeah, so the very first thing I, I, I agree with you.

The very first thing to do is to make sure.

Uh, well at least first C.

See if there is a product that handles all of the platforms that you, that

you, um, uh, that you use, right?

It's very possible you will not find a product that, that does all the platforms

that you use, in which case it's the Yeah.

In which case it is time to go to plan B.

Right?

Which is, you know, more than one backup product.

But don't start with the assumption that you need the

best of breed for every single

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, and so, yeah, I would rather like, like if you just, if you pick

like best product for Microsoft 365, best product for VMware, best product

for, um, I don't know, Salesforce, those are three different products.

You could do that.

I don't think that's a good idea.

Right.

Um.

But, but you, what you might end up with is a company that's really

good at SaaS backup and a company that's really good at on-prem backup

or a company that's good at, uh, Amazon backup, right?

You might end up with two or three that cover that.

You might end up having to do that because of the number of platforms that you use

because there are so many platforms.

Do you remember when we interviewed that IT manager and they told us that

their company was using how many SaaS?

What was

I think it was 50 plus.

Right.

Oh, it was way more than that, dude.

Yeah, it was 400.

It was 400 SaaS products that were being used in production at

their company by like two people.

Most of them were being used by like one guy, and then one woman over here is

using that product and then they got four people and you got a little team over

there in, you know, India and, what's

because being on the other side, like as a consumer of IT resources,

right?

We always are like, oh, we need this tool because it solves my needs.

It's what I need to

do and it's the best of the breed for all the things I need to do.

But then you never think about the poor IT person who's like, what am I going

to do now with this additional SaaS app?

And that's how you end up with like 400.

Yeah.

And, and so, yeah, so to just to go back, try to find a product

that meets, you know, your need.

Try to find the least number of products, least number of backup products to support

the number of platforms that you do.

And, and I, and I do think that SaaS is gonna be the death of you, right?

and I think the other thing is make sure you know your requirements, your needs

versus your wants,

because it's easy to snowball.

And

be like, oh, I want everything.

It's like when you go like building a house or buying a car, it's like, oh,

I really wanna check all the boxes.

But then it's like, oh, that comes with a big sticker price.

Do I really need this?

Do I not?

Like, what do I really need?

Yeah.

Um, I'm gonna say the next thing after we've made sure we have

products that handle the things that we do, and we minimize the number of

those products as much as possible.

Is to look for actual immutability, right?

Why do I say actual immutability?

I am gonna disagree with you on this, but that's okay.

We'll go through it.

Oh, you think you think something else is more important than

the fact that the backups might actually exist when you need them?

You think something's more important than that?

Yes.

Okay.

I can't wait to hear what it is, so,

all right.

So, um, man, I'm dying to know, but

we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about my idea first.

So, yeah.

What do I mean by actual mutability,

This is that your data cannot be deleted before the prescribed retention time.

by

anyone?

or anything.

Or anything including you.

If you cannot delete the data before its expiration period, then that's

as good as you're going to get.

From an immutability standpoint, if you as a super user are allowed to delete data,

that means your account is the target from a cybersecurity attack standpoint.

Because if they can get in there and they can use MFA exhaustion

to, uh, to get in as you.

And um, and even if you know, as much as you may be good at cybersecurity,

I will just say as a small business, you're probably not very good at

cybersecurity, but even if you are very good at cybersecurity, and I

consider myself pretty decent from a things I know I'm not supposed to do,

and yet I've still done dumb stuff,

right.

I've still clicked on links that I shouldn't have.

I've still.

Yeah, I, I fell victim.

And so if somebody gets in as you and they can delete your backups, you might as well

have not have made 'em in the first place.

And the reason why I say actual immutability is there are a lot of

companies that advertise immutability that don't meet that requirement.

Uh, immutability should be a binary condition like death or pregnant, right?

You, you're either dead or pregnant or you're not.

But.

But there

are certain things, like I know we've talked

that if someone has physical access, all bets are off.

Correct.

If someone has physical access and a torch,

right.

Which is another reason, by the way, from a especially small business perspective,

cloud backup is the way to go because the, the physical access is a lot

bigger deal to, to, to get than it is when it's, when it's a small business.

Right.

Yeah,

All right.

Now, now that we've done that, what do you think is more important than immutability?

I think that making sure that there are copies of your data out

there to meet the 3, 2, 1 rule.

So, I'm gonna agree that that is, is very important, but I'm gonna argue

that if one copy doesn't exist, it's.

Still like no backup happened.

I will agree.

We need to make another copy.

Right.

Uh, so we, you're saying we wanna follow the 3, 2, 1 rule is what you're saying?

yep,

And, and, and I, I've, I've both hardened and softened

somewhere with the 3, 2, 1 rule.

So my, you know, my repeated sort of, uh.

What do you call it?

Uh, research into the original 3, 2, 1 rule, which we had, by

the way, the guy who coined the term 3, 2, 1 rule on the podcast.

The original is considered one of the three copies.

That's, that's the, that's the one thing that I, I have softened on a little bit.

The other is the two needs to, it needs to be on two different types of

systems, and again, considering that one of them is on the original, the other

being on a cloud backup meets the two.

Right.

Uh, a lot of people are like, well, if I have two copies, but they're

both in the cloud, that doesn't meet the two of the 3, 2, 1 rule.

Um, and, but the one is real, the, the easiest

when using a cloud backup system.

The easiest to meet is the one, right, the 3, 2, 1 rule.

One being make sure that one of the copies is somewhere else, right?

We used to say offsite.

Offsite doesn't really apply in, in a lot of cases, but just

make sure it's somewhere else.

Well the

reason I bring this up is if we look at a lot of the cloud backup that say

some of the vendors offer natively, they don't follow the 3, 2, 1 rule,

No they don't.

And so that's why I thought it was important.

Now I agree immutability because if your copy isn't there, then what's the point?

Yeah, because you can make all the copies you want.

If I can delete all of them.

That's what I'm saying.

That's why I still, I still think mine Trump's yours.

But as you know, I'm a big fan of the 3, 2, 1 rule.

Um, I.

Yeah, if you are not following the 3, 2, 1 rule, and you know where, where

you really see this is in the SaaS world where you see a, a product like

Microsoft 365 saying, and people that love Microsoft 365 saying that, well, you

don't really need backup 'cause you have all these copies and you have all this

stuff and you got all this history and you got all this stuff and you got this.

Um, you gotta even have, um, retention policies where you can

say that you can't delete it.

Um, if it's, you know, it's gotta be at least 90 days, right?

You, you can't delete it.

So even if you delete it in your mailbox, it's still gonna be there.

And, and I say, yeah, but it's still in the same place.

It's, it's still, it's not a copy, it's just when, when you delete an email.

And Microsoft 365, it de it sets a flag in the database

that that email is now deleted.

And so it just doesn't display it to you.

It's still there.

And then if you use, um, uh, retention policies to make sure that it doesn't

actually get deleted, deleted, it's still there in the same place.

It's just not being allowed to be deleted, which means that if

something catastrophic happens,

It's gone.

it's gone.

Yeah.

Luckily, nothing catastrophic has ever happened in a Microsoft data center,

A bit of sarcasm there, Curtis.

but a little bit of sarcasm and, and it's not just Microsoft.

I don't wanna pick a Microsoft.

It's data centers, right?

reason that I bring up the 3, 2, 1 rule is especially with SaaS applications,

which I'm guessing a lot of small businesses are leveraging, it becomes

important to take that into consideration.

It does, because if the backup, if the SaaS service is basically saying

backup is included, the question is where is that backup being stored?

Right?

Is it being stored on different infrastructure?

If it's not being stored on different infrastructure?

I would like you to go watch the episode that we have on OVH where it took out

both the primary and the secondary right.

Um, I don't care how amazing and how resilient your infrastructure is.

Every resilient, every infrastructure needs something that is like backup,

right?

Is it on a, is it in another location?

Are, are you relying on the primary as a copy, right?

This is like, snapshots aren't backup unless they're copied somewhere.

Um, um,

is it a copy that you have access to, or is it just a copy that the

SaaS provider is doing for their own disaster recovery purposes

and doesn't actually let you recover data?

Yeah.

A perfect example of that again is Microsoft 365 and, uh, to

a lesser degree Salesforce.

Salesforce keeps changing, but Microsoft 365, they do apparently back up their data

center for the purposes of Dr for them.

Um, but that backup is not accessible to you.

Right?

I've clarified that multiple times with Microsoft.

It is not accessible to you if you do something stupid

Yep.

and, um.

And I, and I did that with a, with a very big company that had several

hundred Microsoft, you know, so they, so they had a big old bill.

They were a very big, you know, a decent sized customer

and the answer to them was no.

Right?

That is not, is not for you.

Right?

So if that's the case for a company that has several hundred users, you

with your five little email boxes in 365 are not gonna be anything,

Yep.

Um.

Yeah, so you, you wanna make sure that it's, that it's outside and

that, and that's why really I think, you know, a third party

backup is really the only way to go.

I don't care how amazing the included backup product is,

it's not gonna give you that, that security of knowing that you have a

copy that's in your control, even when the worst happens to that provider.

Yep.

Yeah.

Um, the next thing I'm gonna say is just.

Make sure that, you know, look at pricing, look at costs.

Make sure to include things like restores and retention.

I would like to retain this amount of data.

Some, some of these products, they only allow you to store 60, 90 days, right?

I'd like to store a year, whatever, whatever your requirements are that

you as a business have decided.

Look and get the cost of that, right.

Um, the, especially if you are, if you are deciding, and this is, um, if, if

you're, if you're doing cloud backup.

It might be that restores aren't included in the price, or restores

are included in the price, but then you have to pay the, the egress fee

because they're running in a cloud provider that, that has egress fees.

Make sure you look at the cost of restores.

Uh, you might have additional costs if you want to do the restore quickly

because they're using, um, something like, uh, glacier, um, you know, a deep archive

type product that when you actually.

Um, use it.

You, you, you pay dearly to pull the data out of there, right?

The one other thing to, since we're talking about restores, is

also consider if they give you a faster restore alternative like

Sneakernet or shipping you a device that contains your data, because that could

help you quickly get back up and running.

And yes, there might be an additional fee associated with it, but if it

helps you get your environment back up and running significantly faster

than pulling the data across, it may be worth it for you to consider.

Yeah, we recorded an episode a couple weeks ago with our friend

that he, he only, he only had, well it was, it was, it was, yeah, it was

a terabyte of data, which again, this is, this is a, this is a, a heavy user.

Most of it was photos.

And he, he'd been backing up, uh, for quite a while with Carbonite, and this

is his first big restore and he went to do it, and it took him a while.

Uh, do you remember how long it

I think it was like 22 days.

Something like that.

They offered a, a service to, to send a drive and, and he just decided

not to do it, to save him money, but

And the other thing to also note is that wasn't fully Carbonite's fault.

It was also some issues he had with his laptop doing the

restores,

it does.

not blaming Carbonite fully for the slow restore performance,

but it just is how the stars aligned in his particular case.

Yeah, I'm, I am, um, I'm actually asking him to redo at least a portion

of the restore to see if his new newly minted, uh, internet service

is, um, is gonna, is gonna fix that.

So make sure you test restorers, make sure you test everything

that's important to you.

Make sure you test a large restore to see, and then you say, Hey, this

is how, this is how this worked out.

How can we make it better?

Right.

Um.

And, and, and all of this is an experience, is a chance to experience

the company's support system.

Make sure you do that.

Um, and just realize that the support you get during the pre-sale

process is as good as it's gonna get.

Yeah.

So if it's crappy during, then, then you know that's not really,

that's no good.

No bueno.

Yeah.

Can you think of anything else that we, um.

Um, I think one other thing is I'm sure that you know other

people in your industry, talk to them, see what they use, right?

See what's worked, what hasn't worked.

Maybe they've tried a vendor and switched away,

but talk to them and see what is common in that space.

Yeah, I do a lot of Reddit searches.

There's, there's a lot of stuff on Reddit.

, and also look at the, the vulnerability database and see if, see the degree

to which they have experienced vulnerabilities that some companies

have a lot more than others.

And I think that indicates

something about that company, right?

so here's a, I want your opinion on this.

Mm-hmm.

I'm a small business owner.

Theoretically, right?

I have a thousand things going on.

Uh

I gotta figure out backup.

mm-hmm.

Is it worthwhile for me to actually go do this research, go look up all these

discussion forums, go investigate.

Wouldn't it be better to reach out to like an MSP and take their advice,

Yeah.

least initially to understand what's going on?

Like what I, because I may not even know anything about backup.

I, I think that is a shortcut to a possibly better product.

Um, not all MSPs are, are created equal.

The idea behind the MSP is that they're making money off of this service,

so they're not gonna pick a company.

I.

Whose product doesn't work.

Um, that's not true in all cases, but I do think that that is, that's

better than not doing the research.

Right.

That's better than doing no research.

And then, then you, you still have to research the reputation of that MSP.

Do they have a reputation for, you know, only picking products that work well?

Um, you know,

Yeah.

Either that or like a var, right?

I'm just thinking like a trusted partner you can go talk to, to

get insights into what you should be doing rather than trying to

if you already, if you already have a, a trusted, uh, partner

that can do that for you.

Yes, agreed.

Agreed.

There are a lot of, uh, cloud backup services that basically resell or, or

get rebranded through MSP, so Agreed.

All right.

Well that is our answer for the best cloud backup solutions for small businesses.

Uh, summary ones that work.

All right, well, uh, thanks again for great discussion.

Prasanna.

Thank you, Curtis.

And now I'm sure you're off to go enjoy the ginormous tv

Maybe

maybe.

we're in the middle of watching six triple eight,

which is the fascinating unknown story of a group.

So at during World War II, there was called the Women Army

Corps and there was a black.

Uh, division of the Women's Army Corps, and they were given, uh, what was

considered an impossible job, which was there, there was mail that had

backlogged for months and had piled up and were millions and millions and

millions of undelivered letters, both good news from home, dead soldiers,

letters back to their families, you know, all the really important stuff.

And, um, they were given the job, a job that people that multiple other

groups had tried and failed and, um, they were given six months to

do it and, um, they did it in three.

Never heard of this group.

Uh, six Triple eight was the number of their company, and, uh,

it was an all black battalion.

And, uh, amazing story, uh, starring Olivia Pope.

As the commander, um, which, uh, Olivia Pope is, um, quite well known.

And, uh, you know, it's a good, um, uh, you know, another great

historical drama on Netflix.

Anyway, so we're in the midst of watching that.

Awesome.

All right.

I wanna say thank you to our listeners.

You are why we do this.

I hope this episode was helpful.

That is a wrap.