Episodes

If you're one of those people that look at typical storage offerings for backup and recovery and say, "I can't afford this," you're not alone. A lot of ready-to-go storage solutions can get very expensive very quickly. Our guest this week (Erik Ableson from Infrageeks.com ) ran into this a lot with his small-government customers and SMBs in France, and knew he had to get creative. He wanted to build a hardened Linux repository for Veeam backups, and he also wanted an S3 object storage system ...

Hammerspace offers a global filesystem that creates a single namespace across multiple storage systems and cloud storage providers. Hammerspace's name is inspired by the name for the magical place that cartoon characters get them from (e.g. Bugs Bunny pulling a huge hammer out of his pocket). They've taken a different approach to a global filesystem, using metadata to significantly minimize actual data movement and increase performance. Molly Presley, their SVP of Marketing (and friend of the...

2022 is a new world in the cyber attack space, and Katie Nickels, SANS instructor, and director of intelligence at threat detection vendor Red Canary, describes the top five new attack they are seeing in the space. Spoiler alert: one of them is attacks against backups! Learn from an expert as we discuss the top five attacks they are seeing right now. We talk about living off the cloud, MFA exploits, an increase in nation-state hackers, the increased use of stalkerware, and YES: attacks against ...

This week we talk about this exciting "new" medium for archiving data that is especially attractive to SMBs and home users. It's an optical disc that looks like a DVD and is readable in all Blu-Ray drives, but underneath it's something very different. If you haven't heard of it, then you're in luck! Thanks to Daniel Rosehill, backup anorak and friend of the show, we're going to talk about it – and its competitors on this week's episode! We discuss the good and bad about using all of the follo...

Someone that knew Bill Gates when he was a boy in on the podcast this week, although we only talk about Bill Gates for a moment. He has 30+ years in backup experience and tells us what it's been like to adapt to all of the backup changes over the years. His first backup was to punch cards and punch tape, and he was in the same Boy Scout troop as Bill Gates. Fans of the podcast know his name already, as it comes up randomly on the show as a friend of Curtis. But this is the first time Stuart Lid...

Today we are joined by security expert and host of the Secure Talk podcast , Mark Shriner, to discuss information security. (Make sure to check out his podcast here: http://www.securetalkpodcast.com/) We talk about it from a personal perspective, as well as for organizations. Mark, Curtis, and Prasanna talk about what are the bare minimum things you should be doing as an individual to protect your personal information and data, both from a security and backup perspective. We then move on to t...

So many people are surprised when their restore is slower than their backup. You shouldn't be, as it's quite common. The good news is there are things you can do to make it faster – if you know them in advance. W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Prasanna Malaiyandi tackle the seven reasons why your restore may be slower than your backup. Topics covered include RAID penalties, tape issues, database concerns, and others. You'll walk away knowing what to do in order to find out how slow your r...

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 environments, especially in the public cloud that so many think is a tapeless world. He says the cloud vendors are some of LTO's biggest customers! We talk about what LTO is good at, what it's not so good at, and what that means for how you should use it. Then we shift gears to ...

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 front end of the backup system. Curtis and Prasanna passionately discuss and explain several relics of the ways we used to do things, and why they no longer make sense. Another one is repeated full backups - synthetic or otherwise. Many of them can be addressed by just ch...

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 life, as well as how to do it for a small business. This is a bit different than our usual episode, as there is very little talk about backup and recovery. We talk about where to start when assessing what to do, and what steps you can take right away to prepare. Virginia i...

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 series, and why he decided to finally write some on ransomware. (He explains that everything he talks about his ransomware, but he admits he's been "Mr. Myagi'ing" it for a while.). This guy knows his stuff, and this is the second time he has been on the podcast. He's knowledge...

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 were recorded out of order, so this is the episode where we discovered him on Reddit, and tried our best to distill several thousand words into about 30 mins of advice on how to protect against ransomware. We talk about how to prevent getting it in the first place, how to li...

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, immutable snapshots, and integration with the cloud to address the "smoking hole" problem. Their typical sale (of which they've made many) is north of $1 million, and they have many exabytes of disk in the wild. It's a scale-out storage system without all the typical East-West ...

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 research. The series was inspired by a hack of Conti that resulted in a traunch of internal documents being made public. This gives a unique view into how the organization thinks, how it is laid out just like any other business, the weapons it uses to spread ransomware, and ...

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 unintelligent way. Mr. Backup wasn't sure how this one was going to go, and there were at least one or two arguments along the way. No blows were thrown, though. We definitely talk about what a tape recovery business is, and what it was like to do that. We also talk about tape backup,...

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/user/snorkel42/). (We will not be using his given name during the recording.). He thinks Okta managed to turn a mole hill into a mountain by incorrectly handling the hack that happened in January – that we just learned about last week. That's right, we just found out about a ...

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 and dared to ask the question, "When was the last time you tested your backups?" As Gary explains, sometimes new people have the best perspective. They let him do the first test, and .... it failed spectacularly! It all came down to the documentation they were so proud of. ...

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 important question. First they look at how sizing a SaaS system for backup is different than when you do it in a datacenter, and how that creates challenges for backup design. Does it make sense to use on-premises backup to backup a cloud resource like SaaS? Mentioned in this epi...

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, BrennTag, Acer, JBS, Quanta, NBA,AXA, CNA, CD Projekt, and Kaseya. Then they discuss the trends they see, and the lessons we can all learn from these horrible attacks. Mentioned in this episode: Interview ad

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 that's even necessary. As usual on reddit, there are many opinions. Mr. Backup debates the various points being made by the anit-backup crowd, including an article arguing the same point. We start with an overview of why it's important, then we take on the various argument...

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 Restore it All podcast, and how bit rot caused him to have to restore part of it. We talk about bit rot, the 3-2-1 rule, off-site backups, backups stored in S3 and Google Drive, and what it's like to restore part of a MySQL database. Luckily, the folks at LiquidWeb were very ...

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-25/. I respectfully disagree w/Tom's assertions in his video, and decided to use this as the first episode I'm going to publish a video version of. You can listen to the podcast on all the usual podcast channels, or watch the video version on youtube here: https://youtu.be/y...

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 afford backup," that seems to be prevalent in a lot of universities and research institutions. We then ask and answer the question of whether or not it is every OK to not backup data, along with whose responsibility is it? We pause the recording for what appears at first t...

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, where Vinny works, as they consult in the database space. We then discussed a hot topic from Curtis, which is this idea of companies that say they don't want an IT department. We then discuss the book, Learning MySQL 2nd edition, and Vinny's top 3 performance suggestions for...