Check out our companion blog!

Episodes

May 23, 2022

Data protection warrior explains LTO & RDX

Pat Mayock is a Data Protection Warrior for HPE, and he helped us to understand where he thinks LTO & RDX (a removable disk technology) sit in the market. He explains how much tape is used today in enterprise and cloud envir...

Listen to the Episode
May 16, 2022

Top seven things you must stop doing with your backups

This whole episode is a Mr. Backup rant, where he talks about things that people should really stop doing with their backup systems, starting with backing up directly to tape. There is a place for tape, but it is NOT at the ...

Listen to the Episode
May 9, 2022

How to prepare for an emergency (at home and work)

This week we are joined by emergency preparedness expert and prolific author and speaker, Virginia Nicols, webmaster of EmergencyPlanGuide.org. We talk about why and how to prepare for a disaster/emergency in your personal l...

Listen to the Episode
May 2, 2022

Snorkel42, security expert from reddit, explains his security cadence…

If you liked last week's episode where we talked about this "so let's talk about ransomware" series on reddit, you'll love this week. We have the author, Snorkel42, to talk about the origins behind the security cadence serie...

Listen to the Episode
April 25, 2022

How to prevent ransomware, slow its spread, and respond if you get it

This week, Prasanna and Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) review a series of posts made by Snorkel42, who previously appeared on this podcast in the episode called "Security expert rips Okta for their response to hack." Things w...

Listen to the Episode
April 18, 2022

Vast Data really does appear to be "vast"

Vast is a massively-scalable storage system designed around multiple pieces of technology that weren't available just a few years ago (e.g. NVMe, Storage class memory, QLC) that offers both file and object functionality, immu...

Listen to the Episode
April 11, 2022

A look inside the Conti ransomware group

This episode is a unique look inside the Conti ransomware group, courtesy of a four-part series from Krebs on Security. We review the interesting takeaways from Brian Kreb's series of over 12,000-words from quite a bit of re...

Listen to the Episode
April 4, 2022

Backup is evil (or at least how many people do it is)

This week we are joined by John "Ricky" Martin, Director of Strategy at NetApp (and former owner of a tape recovery business), to talk about his paper that declares that backup is fundamentally evil and done in an unintellige...

Listen to the Episode
March 28, 2022

Security expert rips Okta for their response to hack

We have none other than Snorkel42 from Reddit on the podcast today. He has 20 years experience in InfoSec, and is a prolific writer on Reddit under the handle Snorkel42. (Check out his posts here: https://www.reddit.com/use...

Listen to the Episode
March 25, 2022

Restore test fails due to bad documentation

Gary Williams tells a great story about earlier in his career that taught him the value of testing backups and updating documentation. He explains how he thought his backups were fine, until a "new guy" came onto the scene a...

Listen to the Episode
March 14, 2022

Should you backup SaaS with BaaS?

When you back up your SaaS apps (because you know you are supposed to), should you back them up to a SaaS service or on on-premises backup system? After defining what SaaS is and isn't, Prasanna and Curtis discuss this import...

Listen to the Episode
March 7, 2022

Top 10 Ransomware Attacks of 2021

Learn from others' mistakes by reviewing last year's worst ransomware attacks with Mr. Backup and Prasanna Malaiyandi. Listen to them review the 10 worst attacks from 2021, then discuss lessons learned: Colonial Pipeline, Bre...

Listen to the Episode
Feb. 28, 2022

Mr. Backup takes on reddit about Microsoft 365 backup

W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Prasanna Malaiyandi weigh in on a reddit thread that started with a simple question from a user. He has MSPs trying to sell him a solution to back up Microsoft 365, and he's wondering if th...

Listen to the Episode
Feb. 21, 2022

Mr. Backup Forced to Restore BackupCentral.com!

On this week's episode of Backup Central's Restore it All, Mr. Backup himself becomes the guest, while Prasanna Malaiyandi takes over as host. W. Curtis Preston explains the backup configuration of the website behind the Res...

Listen to the Episode
Feb. 14, 2022

Should DR/backup folks report to the security team?

This is a response to Tom Hollingsworth's (@networkingnerd) video "Disaster Recovery is a Security Function," found here: https://gestaltit.com/tomversations/tom/disaster-recovery-is-a-security-function-tomversations-episode-...

Listen to the Episode
Feb. 7, 2022

What Can We Learn From University of Kyoto Losing 77 TB of Research D…

This week's episode is about an incident that happened at the University of Kyoto, Japan, where they lost 77 TB of research data forever. What can we learn from what happened to them? First we discuss the concept of "we can't...

Listen to the Episode
Jan. 31, 2022

Free backup tools for MySQL & MongoDB explained by author of Learning…

Vinicius "Vinny" Grippa, the co-author of O'Reilly's Learning MySQL (now in its second edition) talks MySQL and MongoDB, as well as that all-important topic of how to back them up! We first learn a little bit about Percona, ...

Listen to the Episode
Jan. 24, 2022

Happy Data Privacy Day!

This week we celebrate Data Privacy Day, which is an international event that occurs every year on 28 January. According to its website, "The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data prot...

Listen to the Episode
Jan. 18, 2022

Does K8s still need DR? O'Reilly K8s Author On the Hot Seat!

Things got a little tense on this week's podcast when James Strong (@strongjz, Co-Author of O'Reilly's Networking & Kubernetes) hinted at DR being a thing of the past with K8s. Mr. Backups was having none of that. No blows ...

Listen to the Episode
Jan. 10, 2022

Resiliency expert reviews Major Facebook Outage

Bob Plankers, resiliency specialist from VMware, joins us on this week's podcast, as we examine last year's major Facebook outage that took out Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all at once. We discuss what we believe happen...

Listen to the Episode
Jan. 3, 2022

Remembering the Best and Worst of 2021

On this first business day of 2022, let’s take a look back at the year that was. It was, of course, another year of COVID. In fact, Curtis contracted COVID right at the end, despite being boosted. This is also the year of t...

Listen to the Episode
Dec. 20, 2021

IT Admin deletes entire datacenter THEN tests his backups!

This week’s guest tells the most incredible story we’ve ever had on the podcast. We’ve had ransomware restores, disaster recoveries after a hurricane, but we’ve never had someone who deleted their entire computing environmen...

Listen to the Episode
Dec. 13, 2021

ZFS filesystem in the cloud – just for your backups

The founder of rsync.net, John Kozubik, joins us on the podcast this week. It's a unique offering: a ZFS filesystem running in a private cloud – accessible only via SSH – that is designed just for sending your backup data t...

Listen to the Episode
Dec. 6, 2021

Rclone creator Nick Craig-Wood Explains This Powerful Tool

This week, we talk to Nick Craigwood, the creator and principal developer of rclone, a very popular open-source tool for copying data to and from cloud providers. Rclone is downloaded roughly 250,000 times each month, and has...

Listen to the Episode