Why Tape Backup for Small Business Makes Sense Against Ransomware

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

backup recovery and cyber recovery.

In this episode, we talk about something that might surprise you.

I. Tape backup for small business.

Mac Store just announced the industry's first desktop LTO Tape drive that's

compatible with Thunderbolt and USB four, and I think that's a pretty big deal.

We get into why this matters for small and medium businesses, especially those

that are worried about ransomware.

Or that generate a ton of data, like video content creators, we break down the costs.

What you need to know how to use tape effectively and, and whether this makes

financial sense for you, is $6,000 for a tape drive crazy or could it

actually save you money in the long run?

Let's talk about it.

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

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 just lost.

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

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

This is the backup wrap up.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, I am w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr. Backup, and I have with me

the only guy I know that goes to Ace Hardware Prasanna Malaiyandi.

How's it going?

Prasanna,

am good, Curtis.

I am a big fan of supporting your local businesses.

what?

support my logo bit.

You know, Lowe's and, and Home

Okay, but there is a reason for why I like to go to ace.

So one, it's a little closer,

me.

Okay.

so it, and if I need to quickly go in, get something and come out, it's great.

The other thing is you can actually find people who will help you.

Like sometimes you walk into Home Depot and you're like, there's like 5

billion things, I dunno where to go.

And then you're like wandering around just trying to find someone

to even ask 'em a question versus like Ace, they always help you.

And then the other thing I found is maybe it's just my Home Depot that

I used to go to, they're not people who are like super knowledgeable

about like random stuff, right?

It's like, Hey, I need to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right?

And they're like, oh yeah, you want that?

Do hooky with this other one and then make sure you do X, Y, and z.

Yeah, I, I'm well aware with, of, of the phenomenon.

What, for me, when I go to Home Depot, what I currently, what,

what I always seem to find is I'm like, I need to do this thing.

Like, it's never like, Hey, I need to swap out the, the, you know, the, the,

the, the, the faucet in my bathroom.

It's never that, that, that, that I know right where to

Yeah.

and, and I just go right.

But I'm like, I need to build this thing.

Like I, like for example, you know this, I built this, I came up with

the idea, I have one of these, uh, portable air conditioners, and I came

up with the idea of building a shelf

Yeah.

to put that right.

So like, I need to build a very specific shelf.

And so I have to, I need somebody that knows the whole store

Yes.

Did you by chance,

is difficult.

did you by chance use a planar when you built that shelf?

I did not, I did not the planer when I built the shelf, but, uh,

I did use the planer yesterday,

Oh,

you

there you go.

and

So,

and yeah,

that's why I like the Ace Plus.

It's also in the same complex that the Orchard Supply hardware, which used to be

up here, a chain, local chain, used to be.

And so I used to like going to the OSH because they were also more

friendly, even though they might be slightly more expensive than a

Home Depot, and they may not have like all the options in selection.

I just like going there.

Yeah, I guess, I guess I just, you know, I just thought it was kind of funny.

Anyway,

Plus, did you know that?

No.

Wait.

what.

Some ACE Hardwares, they also give you free popcorn.

That is in no way a reason that I would use to go to any store,

let alone a hardware store.

But, you know,

So if your breakfast place gave you like a free something every

time you showed up, would you go.

um, well, uh, I

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

go,

yeah.

you know,

Anyway, I'm sure our listeners are tired of us rambling on about this,

Yeah.

if you have not already, please make sure you like or subscribe to the podcast.

Use your favorite podcast caster, right, and use whatever you like.

We do this episode weekly.

We love talking about tech and data protection and cyber recovery, and so.

If you wanna listen to us ramble about things, not always like this,

but sometimes we do talk about tech.

Uh, please subscribe, leave us a comment, a like whatever you want.

It helps us.

It helps grow the show.

It lets other people discover it, and it also makes us feel good knowing that

we're not just talking to the ether and people are actually listening to us.

You know, uh, some, somebody commented there when, when you did this a few

episodes, somebody commented like, you're asking for a, like, or subscribe.

I haven't even watched anything yet.

All you've talked about is ACE hardware.

anyway, but, um.

So this episode is, um, it's somewhat along the lines of something that we've

talked about before, but I wanted to delve, know, deep into a specific scenario

it all started with, um, so there is, uh, a company called Mag Store, mag

Store is a company that sells a number of what I would call storage solutions.

So they sell both hard drives and tape drives as well as tape libraries.

Um, and they're, and the tape libraries, are they gen,

they're, they're, small, right?

And so they're, they're aimed at the, I would say the mid

market, mid to small market, and.

Um, they had a recent announcement that I thought was very interesting, which

potentially opens up a new market for them, which is the, that they announced

that they have what I believe is the industry's first Thunderbolt drive.

Right.

So a Thunderbolt slash USB four, um, desktop tape drive.

So.

Um, yeah, go

For, since I'm going to be the person who knows absolutely nothing

about tape and have never used tape.

Yeah,

Why is that special?

Why is having a Thunderbolt tape drive special?

Or another question is how do people connect tape drives today?

yeah.

Great.

Great question.

So, typically.

Um, and, and this is, this is why I thought this would

be an interesting discussion.

Typically, LTO tape drives, which is easily the industry's leading.

If not, is it at this, at this point?

Is it the only

Tape standard.

still sells.

IBM sells the, still sells the, the 35 90 type line.

But, Oracle/Sun/StoragTek is no longer

in the tape drive business.

They're out of that, but IBM is still manufacturing their drives, LTO is clearly

the standard and clearly everywhere.

Having said that, LTO is almost always connected via fiber channel,

which is not something you're going to see in, um, you know, a tip.

You can buy a fiber channel card for your, um.

You know, for your PC or, but not for your laptop, but making it thunderbolt ready,

um, means that you can plug it in right into a, um, you know, a number of PCs

And

have that support built in.

And so I just think that it creates.

A significantly larger possible.

The,

yeah,

question

get to that.

Yeah.

right, um, possible.

It, it, it just opens up a whole new, uh, you know, a, a dearth

Yeah.

of computers that have that support built in.

So I'm gonna play devil's advocate.

Devil's advocate.

I'm gonna play the other side, right?

Satan on the podcast.

so a couple things, right?

So

Yeah.

we are talking about a small to medium business,

Yeah.

right?

Which has data in their office location, whatever you want to call it.

Right.

Right.

And I know usually on the podcast, right, we talk about, okay, these

companies typically are using SaaS applications or other cloud services.

Maybe they're running their infrastructure in the cloud.

What sort of companies, so we talk about small, medium businesses,

but I don't think it's like.

All small, medium businesses.

Right.

I think we need to sort of narrow down the scope.

And so could you provide like an example of like what sort of companies you think

would have enough data on premises that they may want a solution like this?

Or maybe like how would they be protecting their data today?

Yeah, it's a good, it's a really good question, right.

Um, and, and really good observation too, right?

Because.

So many companies, especially SMBs and what I have called TSBs.

Do you know what A TSB is?

No.

TSB is smaller than A SMB.

What's a TSB?

Tiny.

No fail.

It's, it's, this is, this is a curtisism.

Nobody else uses this phrase, but I call it A-A-T-S-B is a truly small

Oh,

Right.

one person.

right?

Yeah.

Um, I'm, I'm A TSB.

Yeah.

So, um, t TBS and the, the lower half of the s and b market.

would agree a significant amount of their data is in the cloud

and they don't have need for any kind of local storage solution.

Uh, so you know, who, who would this potentially be aimed at?

Right.

So I would definitely say, so a couple of things.

One, it's, it's going to be, well, first off.

We, you know, this is, you know, like everything else, it's gonna

take a while to answer this question.

Let's talk about why they, why they wouldn't want it.

Why,

Well, well, I, I think we'll get to there in a second.

Yeah.

I, I.

just like, who?

I mean it obviously it's going to need to be somebody.

That is probably a little more concern than the rest

about things like ransomware.

They're a little more concerned about the cloud solutions that are available and

the potential issues that there might be.

With ransomware there, they are probably a little more tech

savvy because another potential.

Use for this would be that second copy of, let's say we've figured out how

to back up of our cloud stuff locally.

We figured out how to pull down our Google account and our, you

know, Salesforce account and we've created a local backup of it.

And then, you know, we're using because there, there are people

that, that don't want to pay.

Cloud, uh, fees for

Yeah.

And so they do things like, and we've talked about this.

They do things like script this, bring home the bacon, right?

Bring all the data back to one, because the one downside to the world, the

cloud world, is that you have all this data up there and you don't own any of

Yeah.

So you bring back all that data and then you've got, uh, you've

got that data in one place, and now an on-prem backup solution.

Makes sense and I think that tape, would be a really good way to make sure all

of that data is preserved in a way that is 100% protected against ransomware.

I have als I agree with all those points.

You said I have a couple other thoughts as well.

Um, the first is I was thinking about customers who might also have sort

of low poor connectivity, right?

Because they have enough data that they need to back it up.

Right.

To be able to fit like the 12 terabyte tape drives.

Right.

But not enough that they're like, oh, I wanna necessarily invest in like full

replication and all the rest of that.

Right.

And disaster recovery.

Right.

So they need enough data and maybe they have poor connectivity or they just

can't push the data up and up and down.

Yeah, I thought, I thought that part was assumed, meaning that

if it's a company that has enough data on-prem period to justify an

Yeah.

they make perfect

Yeah,

Right?

Um, because even if you have enough bandwidth to do a

it's gonna be expensive.

idea of creating a local copy that you actually physically own and is

100% immutable, like really, really immutable, then that, that's an

Yeah.

The, yeah.

The other thing I was also thinking about is.

Like small, medium businesses where they're creating large amounts of

data and it's mainly not necessarily archiving, it is kind of archiving,

like in my mind, I'm thinking about all the YouTube influencers.

Mm-hmm.

generating terabytes of data a week.

I.

Yeah.

Right, creating these 4K videos.

Right.

Which they then distill down into an hour long segment a week.

Right.

A lot of the YouTube folks I watch, right?

And it's also the life uncontained episode that we did, right?

Where it was like, Hey, they lost their hard drive, right?

Their computer died and they lost all their data that had not been

copied off, and they were using a hard drive for copying the data off.

But how?

Reliable is that mechanism, you know?

And so for people who are generating terabytes and terabytes

of video, right, of raw content, this could make sense as well.

Yeah, that, yeah.

So any, so anybody who's listening who, who does create a

significant amount of data on-prem.

Right.

Clearly that this makes sense for them.

Well, it potentially could

Yeah.

for 'em.

It makes sense for them Technically to have another question as to whether or

not it makes sense for them financially.

But, uh, and yeah, that, that, that life uncontained, know, thing is

that, that that story is a great story where, you know, they, they

went and they had all this stuff and they lost weeks worth of their raw

video well as the, the in progress.

Yeah.

Stuff that they were editing and they would've killed to have something

like this, that, that, that's just randomly, um, you know, copying.

And they, they may have even been less concerned about, um, you know, the

ransomware, although they should be, they would've liked to have had any copy.

Yep.

Exactly.

Yep.

And, and this is, and, and, and, yeah, it, it could be either backup or archive.

The idea of just having, having a copy.

That once you make that initial investment, that's the beautiful

thing, beautiful thing about tape.

Once you make that initial investment, the, you know, you can make many, many

copies for next to nothing comparatively

Yep.

And, and,

um,

and that cost is not just the cost of the media, but also the power cooling.

Everything else that goes alongside.

Yeah, all that stuff.

I, I do think probably the, the SMBs probably don't give a rat's

ass about power and cooling, but

Yeah.

they should

But, so yeah.

So I agree that there is a use case, so you've convinced me,

Okay.

right?

Uh, one question I do have though.

So let's say that you invest in this solution, right?

I'm a YouTube creator.

I'm generating terabytes of data a week.

Right.

I need to just archive it because I may go back and pull the footage.

I guess the one question I have is for these customers, right?

They're not necessarily super, uh, experienced with backup software

or archiving software, right?

They're not gonna know the ins and out of net backup or

networker or what have you, right?

Things that, so traditional solutions.

yeah, they're probably not gonna buy one of those

Yeah.

And so my question is, do you happen to know if Mag Store makes it simple to

protect your data, or is it something that the CU, the customer now has to invest

time, money, resources, in order to figure out how to copy the data into that system?

Yeah, so the, and this is, that's a great question.

I, this is also why I said earlier that this is going to be a more

tech savvy because going to need to be able to at least grok the, you

know, the idea of using a, a tape.

Which, which not everybody is going to be able to do that.

Right.

We, we got a whole generation of people that, that haven't, um,

I've never used tape.

Yeah.

Like I said, a whole generation of people.

what I, and this, this is, and again, you know, we're, we're, we're.

Talking about a very specific use case here.

I think this is an area where Mac Store probably could help

Yeah.

I do see that they, they resell, uh, retrospect, which

is a very, uh, inexpensive,

User friendly.

literally they sell for 169 bucks, right?

Inexpensive backup software for both Windows and Mac, both of

which would have, uh, Thunderbolt.

And they're also a small enough company that they could support you

and help you along the way, help you figure out, there's also a ton,

ton of resources available for those people that, that aren't familiar

with retrospect and aren't familiar with backup tape and things like that.

and they also have a, a, a software, I'm looking, I'm just

looking at their website right now.

They have a software called Arch Aware, which based on its name,

and it's a little bit more, well, it's quite a bit more expensive.

Uh, it's more about archive

Yeah.

than

Yeah, and,

um,

so I think maybe, especially if this is the market they're targeting, I think

like you said, it becomes important to make it as seamless and easy

Yeah.

for those folks to be able to integrate into using archive or

backup or whatever they choose to use.

Yeah, exactly.

And, and there, there also is a, uh, one great thing about tape is

that there is again, a, you know, a whole variety of free and open source

products that can help you, uh, do what you need to do, uh, with tape.

So, um, that again, that's gonna be, what do you call it?

You know, more of a, more of an uplift, more, more of a, um, you know.

Something for, if somebody's, you know, this is their first

time touching a tape drive.

Um, but it, it, the stuff's available.

Yeah.

for a long time.

And, um, the, you know, and if you're good at reading documentation

and figuring things out, it wouldn't, it, it's not like it's,

Rocket science.

rocket science.

Having said that,

It's

you will need to

not, yeah.

about the concept of streaming tape drives and all, all that stuff.

And, um, yeah.

But.

Uh, I just thought it was interesting that they're going

into a potentially new market here with the addition of putting tape

Yeah.

on Thunderbolt, so,

Now I think the one downside, at least I believe Thunderbolt

is not universally supported.

no, it's not

Yeah.

So I believe a MD chip sets don't support Thunderbolt.

So if you are using one of those,

also saying us before.

I think though this is one of the challenges though, because

if you're an SMB, right?

You're looking for the solution.

You don't have the expertise.

But I think this is where like VARs become useful,

Yeah.

So contact your CDW or whoever you use for buying your equipment.

Who is your trusted partner to help guide you in terms of what you should be doing?

I.

By the way, just as, as an aside, um, the Mag store also offers equipment rental.

Uh, they, they tend to it based on the webpage that I wrote.

They tend to do this for like, short term big projects.

But, um,

available.

any, and it, it is available.

so, so I think we should talk about the elephant in the room.

Okay.

What's the elephant?

Uh,

I'm not the elephant

so this all sounds great.

uhhuh.

Right.

We talked about some of the pros, some of the cons, but I think the one big

con we haven't talked about yet is cost.

Yeah.

So this is so.

Great que or great comment, right?

This is not, this is why this is definitely not for the TSPs and for the

lower part of the S, you know, the the s and bs we're talking about a device.

Just the device that costs around $6,000,

Which, which is a lot for A TSB or an SMB, but I think you have to consider

how much is a normal tape drive, Curtis?

Uh,

If, if you bought like a normal Yeah.

do double or triple that

Yeah.

Yeah.

so what this does, so, so then you have to make your decision as to what

would this allow you to do, right.

So, LT oh nine, so 18 terabytes, so 45 terabytes compressed.

So to buy 40 to buy a, let's say 40 terabyte.

If I had 40 terabytes that I wanted to back up, I can either buy a 40

terabyte dis array or I can buy this.

the, uh, and this is definitely.

This is either way more expensive or less expensive, depending on which 40

terabyte disk array you would go and buy.

Right.

Um, because it, you know, depends on what your com you should, you,

should, I, I would think that you should be comparing it with

array.

Dis array.

or, you know, a

Yeah.

with, with, with, um, lot of stuff built into it, which means that

it would cost a similar cost.

The, um, but it's not, it's not nothing.

It's not a small

Yep.

to pay.

So the question is, does this even make sense?

And what I would say is where it begins to really make sense is if the fact that

the media is removable that you can buy, you know, 'cause if you're, if you buy a,

if you buy 40 terabyte Disre, you get a 40 terabyte disre, that's what you get,

Well,

buy a

and then you have to buy two.

Well, yeah, and you're gonna have multiple copies, right?

So, um, if you buy an LTO tape drive for, in this case, around $6,000 and

then you buy a tape you want another 40 terabytes, you just buy another tape

and that costs you like a hundred bucks.

Let me pull up, uh, let me pull up LTO nine

cartridge.

So, yeah, it's, it's, it's 90 bucks,

Yeah.

For an LT oh nine cartridge.

So you get the first 40 terabytes cost you $6,000.

Yeah,

The next 40 terabytes cost you a hundred bucks.

so,

that either appeals to you or it doesn't

so

a cost perspective.

can I bring another option into the picture?

So I know we've talked about this multiple times on the

podcast, but what about m discs?

They're a hundred gig.

They're a hundred gig M discs available.

I think they must be about, I think last I looked, they were like 15 or $20 a piece.

I wanna say

Yeah.

So mdisk is definitely going to be less expensive than this.

Um.

I.

I would, I guess the, the concern, you know, we've talked about mdisk before,

and I'm generally a fan of mdes or mdisk.

The concern that I would have is that it doesn't, it's, it's a lot.

It's like a lot of other optical media.

It, it hasn't caught on.

Yep.

And what that tends to translate into historically in the

IT world is it disappears.

Um, and that doesn't.

doesn't, that's the one concern I have about

Yeah.

big of a fan as I am of it.

Well,

Um, whereas LTO is the

it's been around forever.

most popular

Speaking of media disks, did you hear recently that people's old Warner

brother Blu-rays or DVDs are going bad?

No,

Yeah, it's like Warner Brother DVDs created in the early two thousands.

I think that the ink is starting to fade, so the disks are becoming unreadable.

That's, that's annoying.

Yes.

So one of the challenges with optical media,

there is, um, there is a new company, uh, whose name is escaping me at

the moment, but there is a new company that is trying to make a

run of it with, um, a new optical

Hmm.

format.

Um, and, uh, I wish him the best of luck.

It again, it, it's about.

You know, meeting the right market

Yeah.

that, right?

But, so here's the question.

So, so e either that math makes sense to you or not.

If the idea of making many, many copies of your data and, and being able to just

make a copy and send it off to the salt mines, it home with you, whatever it is.

That either makes sense to you or it doesn't.

If it makes sense to you, again, this makes it easier for you to do that.

Um, so,

any, any other questions about the financial aspect of it?

Um, no.

I think, like you said, it's important to understand that.

Upfront cost is high, but the ongoing cost is significantly cheaper.

And to also make sure you're doing an apples to apples comparison, right?

You're, you get the benefits of being able to go offsite, right?

Which is important for backup, right?

The 3, 2, 1 rule.

right.

So make sure that you are doing it the right way and comparing it, right?

Just making sure that you're doing an apples, apples comparison because

you do get the benefits of using tape going offsite, the 3, 2, 1 rule, versus

comparing it to the cost of disk.

Make sure it's not just like a 22 terabyte disk sitting on

your shelf, right, because.

You don't have a copy off site.

Right.

You all, you have ransomware issues, right?

All the other things that we've talked about.

Right.

The downsides of being an online connected disc.

If you're just looking at it from a cost perspective, I would agree.

Make sure you're comparing it apples to apples.

You're looking at a similarly.

A storage array of similar quality.

If you're doing a, what we used to call a Fry's, comparison, know, Fry's or

Radio Shack, I don't, I don't know what,

Micro center.

oh, Microcenter.

There you go.

If you're doing a microcenter comparison, quite possibly you're

gonna be comparing it to something that isn't of the same quality.

Yeah.

But you brought up in the last, your last part that you were saying that.

You really have to think about this aspect of ransomware and fires

and all of the things that having a removable medium offers you

backing it up to a disc drive and a dis, it's sitting in there, uh, doesn't offer

you.

Even if you replicate that data to another location,

that data is hackable.

you talk about the story about the box being shipped, the tapes being

shipped back and forth, and why?

Yeah, you can still screw it up, by the way.

And yeah,

and yeah, so just because you start using tape, you know, um, yeah.

There, there was a security guard whose job it was to, it was basically a, it

was a remote office for a larger company and his job was to take the tape out.

It was an LTO take, take the tape out, put it in a, a special box, put that in

FedEx and FedEx the box out, and then they would ship the, there were two basically.

There were two that were going back and forth and, uh, lemme try that again.

Two going back and forth.

And one day they, um.

They decided to, um, for whatever reason, somebody looked inside

the box and, uh, the box that he'd been shipping had been empty.

And so he wasn't doing anything.

He was just pushing the tape back into the drive and he was shipping

empty boxes back and forth, and they checked the weights of the FedEx boxes

and he'd been doing it for months.

Yeah, so don't do that.

If you are using removable media

yet.

the goal was to keep a copy offsite, make sure you actually take it offsite.

Yeah.

And I would, I would, I would learn, if you're going to use tape as a

backup medium, I would look into the concept of disc staging, which will

cost you some more money, right?

But save you money, I think in the long save you money and

hassle in the long run, right?

Don't be doing incremental backups across the network directly

Yeah,

You're not gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna piss that tape drive off and

and I.

on a regular

I think Mag Store offers solutions for that, right?

They do offer a, looks like a built-in raid plus tape

Yeah.

Yeah.

array.

sure that they'd be more than

Yeah.

sell you the complete solution, right?

You, you don't necessarily need, like in this case, let's say 40

Yeah.

you don't need, your entire envir the size of your entire, you just need enough

disc for like a night's worth of backups.

And what you do is you go back to the way we used to do things.

You do, you take your environment, you spread it out over a month, you do a full

backup of one 28th of your environment.

Every night and you do an incremental backup of the rest, and that, that

means you only need, you know,

Enough.

of terabytes of

Yeah.

uh, as your disc station, you back up to that and then you

copy the tape and that'll make your tape drive much more happy.

Yeah.

But this idea of having a copy that you can then bring off site,

I think for many, I think that will appeal to a lot of people.

Yeah.

Or it should appeal for a lot of people if they're not doing it today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I ju I just, I, so I want to speak to those people just for a minute.

So we've talked about, you know, it, it's expensive.

We've talked about the fact that you do need to learn a little bit about tape

and what, how tape works and all of that.

Right.

I. And, uh, having said that, let me just give my spiel about tape.

Why tape is so good.

Tape is problematic when it comes to streaming it, uh, across the network.

It can be difficult and, you know, you can go listen to that that I have.

I think we call it the Backup From Hell

Yeah.

episode, the backup that took me forever.

Um, um, having said that.

I'm gonna remind people if, if they don't know already.

Tape is better at writing ones and zeros than disc is.

It's better at holding onto ones and zeros for long periods of time than disc is.

And once you get that initial investment out of the way, it is also less expensive.

Right.

That third part really only applies if you're going to be making

lots of copies of your data,

Yeah.

right?

Um, and, uh, perhaps, and by the way, maybe you go back to that, go to your

use case there of your, uh, the, the,

YouTube.

Yeah.

Maybe you are shipping data back and forth.

You know what?

Nothing beats the bandwidth of a FedEx truck.

Yep.

If you've got a, if you're, if you're, you know, some sort of content

creator, you know, I'm, I'm a couple hours away from Hollywood, right?

If is shipping LTO tapes all over

Mm-hmm.

And the, the same thing could be true for you if you've got that use case.

Again, it makes a

Yeah.

but again, when I say it's better at writing ones and zeros, what I mean

is there's something called the.

The bit error rate that you know for every X number of bites that you

write, one of 'em is gonna be wrong when you talk about magnetic media.

has, LTO specifically has one or two orders of magnitude better than,

uh, any other, uh, disc medium.

And then also if long-term storage matters to you, tape is much better.

At doing that for decades, whereas DISC really only hold

onto data reliably for about

five years.

and that's the key, right?

It's the, at some point when you want the data back, are

you gonna get your data back

Right,

you wrote it out?

And you know, for a hundred bucks you can make another copy and then, you know,

So.

one problem, you can pull out a different

So here's a question.

Here's a billion dollar question for you, Curtis.

All right.

Why aren't you using tape at home?

Dang.

Just throw that out for me.

Just throw that out for me.

Uh,

because you're preaching about this, right?

Yeah.

so first off, I'm A

I.

I'm not about to go spend $6,000 so that I can back up the relatively small

amount of data that I have, I do create.

But honestly, once I've created an episode, edited an episode, uploaded

an episode, I'm kind of done with it.

Right.

and the data that, uh, I do think is important, I back it up via

multiple means, and I don't.

I, I, I would have difficulty justifying the price of a $6,000.

First off, was only last week that I found out a $6,000 tape drive

was even available for my market.

But I would have difficulty

Yeah.

that level of price for my amount of my amount of data.

And for you especially, right, you end up backing up to the cloud, which is

what we tell a lot of people, right?

If you're a small, medium business, you should be writing.

Let's go back to the beginning of this episode, right?

It was like, for most people, right?

In the small medium or in the TSB section.

Or segment, just back up to the cloud, right?

Unless you have a specific use case that doesn't allow you to do it right.

And then look at these other alternatives.

Absolutely.

All right.

Well I think that was an interesting discussion.

Sorry for putting you on this spot multiple times, Curtis.

Hey, it's what I'm here for.

It's what I'm

You did good.

Good job.

Oh, thank you very much.

And, uh, all right, well, and, and you, and you folks did good too, listening in.

If you're still here with us, you know, and you're not sleeping.

Uh, thanks for sticking out with us this far.

That is a wrap.

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

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

work, check out backup central.com.

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

Remember, this is an independent podcast and any opinions that

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

Thanks for listening.