Life Uncontained YouTube Channel Loses Month of Footage in Crash
In this episode, we discuss the devastating crash experienced by the popular YouTube channel "Life Uncontained," which resulted in the loss of a month's worth of irreplaceable video footage. The Life Uncontained crash serves as a stark reminder of the importance of proper backup strategies for protecting valuable digital assets. We delve into the lessons learned from this unfortunate incident and explore the best practices for safeguarding your data from hardware failures and other potential disasters. From the 3-2-1 backup rule to the use of multiple storage media, we cover the essential steps you can take to minimize the risk of catastrophic data loss. Whether you're a content creator, business owner, or simply someone who values their digital memories, this episode provides crucial insights into the world of data protection and backup. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from the "Life Uncontained" story and fortify your own backup plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQsTs3C0T-c&ab_channel=LifeUncontained
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Have you ever lost irreplaceable data due to a hardware failure?
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This week on the backup wrap-up we discussed the unfortunate story of the
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popular YouTube channel life uncontained.
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And they're crashed.
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It led to losing a month's worth of valuable video footage.
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But Kenzie and Spencer faced a devastating setback when their
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laptops SSD failed taking with it.
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Weeks of raw video footage, documenting their off-grid home
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build and precious family memories.
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We'll explore the importance of proper backup strategies.
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The lessons learned from this incident and how you can protect
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your own data from similar disasters.
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Let's make sure this doesn't happen to you.
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If you're not familiar with me and why I'm so passionate about this subject first
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I'm w Curtis Preston during my first job as a backup admin, my company lost an
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important database that I couldn't restore since that nightmare I've done all I can
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to make sure that will never again happen to me or anyone who will listen to me.
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This podcast turns unappreciated, backup admins, and to cyber recovery heroes.
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This is the backup wrap up.
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W. Curtis Preston: Welcome to the show.
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I'm your host, w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr.
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Backup, and with me.
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I have the person who's gonna help me get through this horrible moment in my life.
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And what is this horrible moment in your life?
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W. Curtis Preston: You know, that beautiful blue, all
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electric vehicle that I have,
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Yes.
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W. Curtis Preston: Um, someone hurt it.
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What happened?
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W. Curtis Preston: I, I don't know.
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It, it, it's after it was in a parking lot or something, and it just
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sort of, it's got a, like a dent.
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Oh, oh, ouch.
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Is it, can it be, can it be PDD
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W. Curtis Preston: I don't think so.
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Uh, what's PDR?
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What, what, how, what have I told you about throwing out random?
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paintless dent
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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It's on a crease.
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It's right, like it's literally the worst, like, you know what I mean?
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Like where it happens to be, it's on the wheel well, it's
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right on the crease of the wheel.
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Well, somebody slammed something into it.
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And, uh,
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Prasanna Malaiyandi: You might be surprised.
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Those PDR guys are pretty magical.
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W. Curtis Preston: I would be very surprised.
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Oh, it's noticeable?
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It's very noticeable.
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There was paint transfer, um, yeah, there was paint transfer.
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It was white.
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Um, and um,
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Prasanna Malaiyandi: Did you have Sentry mode
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on?
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W. Curtis Preston: so I was in a parking lot.
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And I was under 20% power.
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So no century.
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So I've reported it to my insurance company and uh, Monday
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I have a, a, um, an estimate.
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Um, it's interesting that particular body part, it's the worst body part
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for this to happen to, because.
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Because it's attached all the way
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up
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W. Curtis Preston: attached.
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Well, it doesn't go all the way.
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I, I look, I took a look at it and it, and it, and it's, it's actually
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better than I've seen in some cars.
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Basically, it's one part, but it goes all the way down underneath
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the doors, all the way up to the front of the, of the front door.
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But it doesn't continue on after that.
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So it's, it's one piece.
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So I think, yeah, I don't know.
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We'll see.
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We'll see what they say in terms of the, uh.
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Are you sure you wanna get it
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fixed?
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W. Curtis Preston: I'm tired.
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Yeah.
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I, I, I can't, you know what I mean?
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You can't see.
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Is it on the driver's
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W. Curtis Preston: What's that?
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Is it on the
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W. Curtis Preston: It's, no, it's on the other side.
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Um, it's just, uh, well, I'll just say this.
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I'm gonna get an estimate.
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I'm, I'm gonna see what the insurance company says, and, um, I'm gonna see
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what they say in terms of how long I'll have to do without my Tesla.
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Like if they order the parts, like your car is
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drivable and all the rest, so you might just have to, yeah.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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Um, or if they're gonna actually fix that part.
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Uh, it just, it's just that because it's on a crease, uh, you know, I
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just, I don't see them properly molding that part without, but it could be
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wrong, you know, who knows, right?
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If they take, if they're able to take the part off and mold it and
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make it all beautiful, I don't know.
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But I think the most likely.
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Well, I, I, so, so they would not, yeah.
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So if they take it off, they're
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replacing it.
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If they're doing PDR, then what they'll probably do is drop the wheel liner,
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try to get in from behind to push it out, like with one of the little
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sticks as they're hammering around to try to push it out while they're pulling back.
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At least that's what I've seen other PDR guys do on all the random
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YouTube channels that I watch.
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W. Curtis Preston: One of your, one of your many, one of your many skills
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that you have, but don't actually have
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your skills that you possess only mentally.
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Um, yeah.
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So
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Jack builds.
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It is a really good YouTube channel.
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He does some amazing stuff with
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bodywork,
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W. Curtis Preston: know, if this car was like five years old and
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this amount of damage happened to it, I'd be like, yes, screw it.
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But the thing is not even a year old yet, and I have to live with this.
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But you gotta help me get through this.
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Man.
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Prasanna Malaiyandi: You'll get through it.
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It'll be fine.
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, W. Curtis Preston: I'll see how that goes.
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So this is on the tail end of our cloud disaster series, but this really isn't
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a cloud disaster in any way really.
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It just, uh, does technically involve a website that is in the cloud,
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but the data loss occurred before it ever even got to the cloud.
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Yeah, and this is actually probably an episode
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that I pushed for just because it is a, uh, YouTube channel that I've
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been watching pretty much nonstop for weekly, for the last three plus
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years.
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W. Curtis Preston: so why don't you, why don't you tell us a little
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bit about who these people are?
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Um, and, uh, you know, what, you know, just, just, just tell us
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Prasanna Malaiyandi: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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So as people who listen to the podcast probably know, I tend
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to watch a lot of YouTube.
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A lot of it tends to be car related, but there are a couple channels I watch
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which are kind of building related, like people building homes or other
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things like that, or furniture and.
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I dunno, I'm always fascinated with like the fabrication aspect of things.
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So this channel is called Life
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Uncontained and it is a couple from Florida who sold everything and
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they moved to Texas and they live in the middle of nowhere, off grid.
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Um, and they decided, hey, we're just, we want to be green environmental, uh, we
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don't want to be tied down with things.
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So they're like, we're gonna build our own home.
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And unlike most people who'd be like, Hey, let me go figure out like a tiny
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house, or let me go buy land and just move a house on it, or just buy a
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property with land or with a house on it.
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Already they're like, Hey, we wanna build a storage container home.
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W. Curtis Preston: Nice.
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And,
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So
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they,
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W. Curtis Preston: is this, is it are, they're not gonna fit everything
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inside one storage container, right?
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Are they?
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They're gonna put different storage containers together.
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So they bought two storage containers for their house.
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So before, so the two people, it's uh, Mackenzie and Spencer.
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And so, uh, they bought land, they have it all situated, and they
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bought two used storage containers.
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I think one was from like the ever, ever grande company.
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So one of those large shipping container companies and they decide,
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Hey, we're going to cut it out.
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A good part of the, uh, floor plan is the storage containers, but
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they've done things so it doesn't look really like a storage container.
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Like the inside looks really nice.
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It has tall ceilings because there's a gap between the two storage
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containers with the vaulted ceiling.
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Um, they've put an extension off one side, so there's like,
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yeah.
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So, and then there's also like a room outside with an attached porch.
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So not everything is in the confines of the two shipping containers, but they've
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used that as like the core structure and it's sitting on top of, uh, cement pylons.
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Um, and so it's above ground and swell, insulated.
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They have framing inside, so it looks like a normal place.
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It's just the outside bones.
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Instead of it being like.
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Wood like you would normally do in the Bay, in California, or
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whatever else you use in your area.
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They just used a shipping container as a starting
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W. Curtis Preston: So they put like, like some sort of siding on
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the outside, so it doesn't actually look like a shipping container.
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Yeah, so for most of it, it is the shipping
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container For the bottom parts, they kind of have wood, uh, wood pieces.
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Uh, but the outside is like a shipping container.
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It still has the doors, the big open doors on one side.
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W. Curtis Preston: So they can,
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Uh, but the bottom, it's all completely like
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spray foam, so it's super insulated.
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There's a roof on the top, like a normal looking roof with the pitch.
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To it, it has normal windows, so they cut out openings for windows, all the rest.
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Um, but they're completely off the grid, right?
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So they have to harvest their own rainwater.
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They have to filter it out.
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They have solar.
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There's a barn that they lived in for I think the first, like five
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months while they, or six months while they were building it out.
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So
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W. Curtis Preston: is a really popular YouTube channel.
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I, I think it's like one and a half million subscribers.
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W. Curtis Preston: for those of you that don't know, is way more
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than enough to monetize and to help fund this, uh, this project.
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Right?
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This is actual income for them.
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This is not, uh, in fact, I would think
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yeah.
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So they left their jobs.
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I don't remember what they did, but neither of them really had experience
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in like construction at all.
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Right.
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So Spencer learned how to do everything from framing to how to do plumbing,
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electrical, how to hang drywall, right?
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Finishing off drywall.
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He did pretty much everything how to, how to install a roof,
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how to deal with all your water containment and everything else like.
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It was pretty like just watching the videos like it's backbreaking, but amazing
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just to look at how much they've grown and how much they're able to do now versus
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when they started, like they started in 2017 and so it's been quite a while.
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But yeah, they have I think 261 million views on YouTube, so there are a lot of
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people who
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so this is a, this is a big small business, right?
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This is not, this is not just some, it's not me, but just
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some dude making some videos.
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And, you know, we're, and by the way, you know, for those of you that don't
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know, you know, this podcast, for those most of you listen to this as a
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podcast on some sort of podcast app.
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If you don't know this exact, you know, podcast with the same content.
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Uh, if you want to look at our lovely mugs, um, you can watch this on YouTube,
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uh, by, by the same name, right?
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Uh, backup wrap up, uh, on YouTube.
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But, uh, this is, they were making, it's, I think it's just important to
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understand before we get into what happened is that this is a big channel.
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These are, this is a couple that, um.
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Was, this is how they were making their living was advertisements and whatnot.
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Basically, the various ways that you can monetize a YouTube channel.
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By the way, they have two kids now with a third on the way
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W. Curtis Preston: Um,
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and they still continue to do all this
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work and release weekly ads and they bought another property.
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I don't not quite sure where that is.
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Completely remote on a mountain that they are.
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Getting another shipping container built out in their current location,
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and they're going to move it to the new location so that they can also stay
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I mean, once you've created a, a YouTube
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channel with that many followers on how to take a shipping container
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and turn it into a home, the only thing you can continue to do is to
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continue to, to make other shipping containers or to take other shipping
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containers and turn 'em into homes.
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Um, and so how were they doing, like the production of this show?
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Yeah.
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So it was all filmed by the two of them.
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Um, and so there was, uh, like each episode, I would say it
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would come out once a week.
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It was probably about 22 to
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25 minutes each.
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I.
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But to get the 22 to 25 minutes of content right, they would do
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entire weeks' worth of shooting.
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Right.
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So every little thing they would shoot, they would get raw footage, right?
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And then mackenzie, the wife, was the one who would normally do all the editing.
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And so she had her laptop that she would use and she would edit
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before it was in a barn between the barn and the house being built.
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They lived in a small camper van for a little time,
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W. Curtis Preston: Hopefully that's
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before
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she basically did all, uh, no.
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They actually had their first kid and they were living in that camper van.
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Yeah, the first kid had just been born and it was too hot in the summers, I think.
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So they had lived there 'cause that had the only place with air conditioning.
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Uh, so yeah, they lived there.
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Uh, they didn't have, so this was before starlink.
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They had some cellular service where they could barely get internet out there.
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Sometimes they had to drive into the major town in order to be able to actually
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do uploads and other things like that.
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So.
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It, like I said, it's in the middle of nowhere.
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Right.
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And so they were doing everything on their own and they had all this
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footage, and it wasn't just only footage for the channel, right?
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It was also, they wa they were taking videos and memories,
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right.
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Of like their time doing this project with the kids.
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Right?
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So not every, and they had two dogs by the way, so not everything actually
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made it to the channel, right?
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They had a lot of footage that they kept for themselves.
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W. Curtis Preston: but it appears that this footage was either
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in only one of two places.
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It was on.
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SSD cards as they were filming.
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Right.
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Whatever, whatever their, their video camera, or, I dunno if they, they,
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they weren't using an iPhone, right?
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They were using some kind of, yeah.
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Yeah.
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So they have a video camera that's got a, an SD card in it, and then they're
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going to download that SD card onto their laptop and it appears that.
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They just had a nice beefy laptop with a lot of storage on, said
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laptop, and it was, uh, based on the story, it was an SSD card.
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Right?
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That was the, the main storage on that laptop.
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And anyone who has listened to this podcast before knows where this is going.
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Yep.
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Just, and just to correct you slightly though, Curtis, so there
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was actually a third location.
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they do have external hard drives that they do offload raw
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footage to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right, but when they're in the, like their previous data, but when they're in the
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process, right, they've taken a video, but they haven't created the YouTube yet.
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Right.
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That data lives on their laptop until Mackenzie can finish
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processing it, creating the final YouTube output, and then
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so I, I guess just to make my statement more
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correct, all work in progress is in one of two places, either on the SD
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card or on the SSD in the laptop.
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Completed work is then transferred to hard drives and, um, what happened?
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So like I said, I watch 'em weekly and it's one of the
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things I get the little notification, I'm like, Hey, lemme go check out their video.
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So I went and they were like, uh, yeah, sorry.
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Then I think this was in October of 2023, they were like, yeah, sorry.
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We lost our
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data.
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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I think the title of that episode was We Lost Everything, right?
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Yeah.
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And I initially, when I saw that, I was like, do they have a fire?
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Like they have batteries there, they're living on a farm in
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the middle of nowhere, right?
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And so I was like, did the house burn down?
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Like what happened?
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Did the barn burn down?
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Did they have wildfires?
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But no, their computer crashed
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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And, and by crash and burn, you don't mean literally burn, but just sort
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of crash and burn the uh, the, the, uh, the, the figurative speech, yeah.
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Or figurative speech.
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Um.
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And this is interesting because this is not what I would call.
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The typical data loss story of like an average Joe.
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The average Joe used to have hard drives and hard drives just die.
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They just do their mechanical devices.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They, you know, uh, somebody, I forgot who told me this
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
recently, and I, I really like it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're like, hard drives, do two things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They, you know, or the, well, three things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They read data, they write data, and they die.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, and I think if, if the, the, the sort of, the belief is that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
SSDs are far more reliable, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and they are, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I mean, just statistically speaking, SSDs fail far less often than, uh, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
hard drives with, with moving parts.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But they do fail.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We don't entirely know because they're not technical people.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We don't entirely know what happened here to the drive, but it was to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
use, to use their words like fried.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And on top of that, so I know for this podcast,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
normally we try to keep a couple episodes sort of in our backlog that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
are ready to be edited and published just in case one of us has a conflict.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So they normally record and then publish, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That week's content or the prior weeks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But because like I mentioned, they're building out this new
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
place in this remote location.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They basically had like four weeks worth of content sitting on that laptop that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
was ready to be edited and published.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Which normally never happens.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so now they had a bunch more content that they've lost all of a sudden.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Y Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So they didn't just lose, you know, one week's for the content they lost.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It sounds like about a month's worth of content, maybe even more than that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And uh, and, and again, this is, this is a bit like the episode
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that I just published, uh, that's gonna go live, uh, on the 22nd.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You know, we, we talked about the, the research data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, you know, the, the, the company Deduce and how that these, these
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
researchers and, and, and, uh, doctoral students, how that they lost data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that is, is sometimes irreplaceable.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You think about what happens in these people's lives.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're filming a story as it's unfolding, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're filming.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm building,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They can't go
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backwards.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: this wall.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm building the roof.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm putting in the plumbing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, the plumbing's put in now.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Unless you're gonna rip out the plumbing and go back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, and, and, and, and refilm it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That data is irreplaceable.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And they, so they lost it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, and boy, did they seem, uh, I did watch that episode.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Boy, did they seem, uh, defeated?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
What, what did they do at that point?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
so they called up, I think, a repair shop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And they took their laptop in and I think they said that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
their motherboard was fried.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That data is not retrievable.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And they were just heartbroken.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I think one of the quotes was, I feel so dumb saying this,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
but I should have known better.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Like clearly I trusted the computer a little bit too much,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, clearly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I did wanna bring up thing I, from a previous
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
comment you made about SSDs and people thinking they're invincible.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So like you, I own a Tesla, I don't talk about it much.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but uh, for a while I was running century mode and I had one
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
of those USB flash drives, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That drive died within a year,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
like completely inaccessible.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Plug it in, nothing shows up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's just like caput.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And people don't realize where cycles matter, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
How many times you write to that drive, there's only a finite amount.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now, if they were editing videos, copying data, and then copying out,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
constantly doing this week in, week out, 'cause the laptop was from
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
2019, so it was four years old.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're copying data all the time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm guessing at some point they just hit the wear limit on the drive itself.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that's possible.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and, and, and by the way, the, the, the and a person who has, has had
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a couple of dash cams over the years.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
One of the hardest things an SSD does is record streaming video.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Nonstop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so the, the funny thing is, with your car,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the well plus he, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The funny thing is, with your car, uh, the number of hours of video
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that had to record weren't that many.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So that's kind of funny.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But, uh, but yeah, you, if you're, if you are using an SSD, um, you know, a,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you know, a solid state drive to record.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Streaming video from dash cams.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
There, there is a, like an extra level of, um, um, endurance level
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that they call it like that, that's specifically aimed for dash cams.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and, uh, I, I doubt that the, that the, the free SSD that you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
had, uh, was one of those Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, so it was a USB stick and yes, it wasn't.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So now I actually run an SD card, like you mentioned, that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
intended for high endurance, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so that does a lot, lot better and has been going on for like three years
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, so the, the part that, the the part that bothers me about this story, yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Obviously we know that had they had.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A workflow that included backing up the data along the way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I, I, I will say this, I'm, I'm very sympathetic to the challenges of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Backing up data as you're working on it, and especially backing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
up significant amounts of video data as you're working on it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, I, I, the company, you know, when I had my own company a few years ago, we
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
used to do a lot of filming in the field and, um, it, one of the hardest things
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
was to get multiple copies of the data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And the way we did it was kind of interesting.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The camera that we used had a twinning feature, so you could put two SD
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
cards in there and it would film that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And what we would do is we would pull one and that would be the the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
just in case copy, and then we just wouldn't overwrite it for a shoot.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Make sure that we, we didn't pull that stuff out until, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we didn't override it until we had made sure we had a, a more
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
long-term, uh, uh, physical copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But most people don't have that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and it's a lot of data, so it's, it's very difficult.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's shooting at 4K now too.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Exactly right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, you know what they should do?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They should get a red camera.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
This will solve all that, all that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, so here's one of the other things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Is that going to your 3, 2, 1 rule, Curtis, they're not following
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the 3, 2, 1 rule, even with they had an external backup, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A fire hits their
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
home.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Takes out their hard drive, which might be in the same building, or let's just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
say they put it in the barn, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Then that still has the same impact.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They need to take a copy off site, and maybe now that they have the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
second location that they've built out, maybe they take their external
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
hard drives and they keep it there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But then it's that practicality of how often are you going back and forth
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and updating that copy and keeping it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I mean, you know, you have to find, you have to, you have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to find that balance between.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Usability and security, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It, it's the problem that we, that we, that we, um, that we deal with everywhere.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And I would think that the one thing that they definitely should have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
done is to make that second copy on a different type of device right on, on a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
hard drive versus an SSD, for example.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, and yes, I do think that they should have that other copy, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that other copy could be less.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Less frequently updated, but at a minimum, don't let your only copy of data be
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
sitting on a device that if it goes, you're gonna lose a month's worth of work.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, that, you know, could have, that could have, uh, helped them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Because, you know, they're so remote, getting a, giving some sort of cloud
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
backup that's not gonna happen.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Especially with video, and the best they could probably do is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
starlink, and even that is not.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Good enough for the amount of data they have to move.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, the reason I was laughing is I know you talked about keeping
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it on external hard drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So the husband actually admitted in the video, Spencer, that six months in, he
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
accidentally erased that external hard drive and they lost all the footage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Ouch.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, uh, but he is like, I've never done that again, so it's good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But yeah, like you said, human mistakes happen.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If they had their other copy, then at least they wouldn't have lost
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
those six months worth of data, the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
raw
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I think the one part, and I, I started to say it a few minutes ago
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
and got, got sidetracked, squirrel.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, is that the one part about the story that bothers me the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
most is that, you know, they took it to, um, you know, their.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Some sort of support shop, and I don't think that the support shop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's highly unlikely that the support shop was skilled in the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
art of data recovery, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The one piece I would've also liked and it, and it killed me
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
because we knew about the story.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I was trying to reach out to them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're so popular.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I was trying to message them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I tried to go to 'em through Facebook, through LinkedIn,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
through every way that I could do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'm like, Hey, um, you know, uh, have you tried this?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That would be the one thing that I would've liked to have seen them dry, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I'd like for others to think about this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They are, they were between, you know, they weren't between
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
a rock and a hard place.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They were just, they were just under the rock.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They were, they, they had lost a month's worth of work a month or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
more's worth of work, and they.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
What they could have possibly given that this was a revenue
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
generating amount of video.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That data that was on that SSD had a monetary value that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
they could have turned into a.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A business justification for talking to one of the various data recovery services.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Now, you know, I don't know how much people know about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
these services just in general.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Do you wanna just talk about what we're talking about here?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So these are companies that specialize when other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
companies say, your data's not restorable.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They're the ones who you call to actually be like, Hey, let me try to get
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
whatever I can get off of these drives.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
They may not be able to get everything.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But they will try.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So typically with hard drives, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
When you used to hear the clack, clack, clack, and then your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
hard drive would crash, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
These are the guys you'd call, you'd send them your hard drive, they
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
disassembled a hard drive in a clean room, put it the pieces into back
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
together in a separate hard drive and try to restore your data, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I don't know exactly what they do on the SSD side, but I'm sure that they
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
have similar mechanisms as well to read the data off of SSDs, even though
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
your laptop could not technically
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that, and that's the part that that bugs
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
me in this story here is that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It, it's, it's partly because of the apple, um, architecture.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And for those of you that don't know all of the apple, you know, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
motherboards, the main hard drive is soldered into the motherboard.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's not, it's not something that can be unplugged and handed to somebody, but a.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so the computer person, all he can judge is what he can see via
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the mechanics of that motherboard.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It's highly possible that that hard drive was fine or that that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
SSD was fine, but that it just needed to be connected to something
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that could prop properly read it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And that's what these, um, hard drive recovery people would be, is that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
they would be able to, you know, uh, I, I'm assuming uns solder that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That, um, drive from the motherboard and then connect it to something
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
else that can, can read the drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Or at least maybe get some of your data back out.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Maybe not a hundred percent, but some is better than none, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you know, we're talking about companies like On Track, um, uh, secured
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
data recovery, um, drive Savers, you know, we'll put some links in the show notes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
uh, to the type the types of companies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
These are the companies that, you know, I've spent my career
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
trying to help people not to need.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but they do exist for this exact scenario.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And the only thing that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Truly bother me about this story is that it did, didn't seem that anybody
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
was advising them to at least try one of these services and, and so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
we'll never know if they could have potentially gotten that data back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, maybe they still have the laptop around.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Mackenzie and Spencer, if you just happen to run across this episode, ping us.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Let us know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We'll try to get you in touch with the right people to see what they can
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
do, and hopefully you still have your laptop and maybe you can get your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: I actually reached out to the folks at Secure Data Recovery.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I know them pretty well, and they actually offered, uh, you know, for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
promo, for promotional consideration, they offered to, to do this for free.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, so if anybody sees this and knows them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Then, you know, um, that that offer is still open.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And, uh, it would be interesting if we could get a semi happy ending.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I mean, at this point, that footage is probably not as valuable as it was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
back then, but, um, you know, the,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
But all those other memories you have of your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
kids and you and Spencer, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
You could get those back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, so.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We talked about what they could have done, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We talked about that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I, I think that it's a real challenge when you're doing data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
In a remote situation like that where you're creating a significant
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
amount of data in a remote situation.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so the really only, the, really, the only solution that would be appropriate
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
to their scenario is, like I said, copying the data to a local hard drive to make
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
sure that you, you don't have that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And yes, I probably would make multiple copies.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Put another one somewhere else.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Even.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Even if it, like you said, it's just in the barn.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, I'm assuming the barn is more than just a barn given
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
who we're talking about, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, the barn was already existing on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Like is it like leaky and stuff?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That's what,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: so maybe that's not the best place to put the other copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
it's like a metal
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
barn.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And so let's talk about what, what others can do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So one of the very common things that people are at this point are doing is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
actually using the, the iPhone, uh, and their Android to film stuff, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And both of those do have the idea of getting the data,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
uh, replicated out there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
We had an entire episode.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, dedicated to properly backing up your iPhone or your Android.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And really what that came down to as far as I remember was it just, you know, we
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
looked at a bunch of different options and the answer that we found that worked
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
for, for both was iDrive, um, that it handed, it handled both the, um, the,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
the iPhone, the Android, as well as the Mac and the windows, uh, desktops.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And for an incredibly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Affordable price and, uh, because I think the key for anything is
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
that you want to make it as, as sort of unobtrusive as possible.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, did that, is that the right word?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Unobtrusive Inobtrusive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Seamless.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Lemme just hang on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No, I was, I was right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I was right the first time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Unobtrusive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, if we can do automated stuff, the, the more automated it is, the better, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And that's what I like about the iDrive method.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
I just put a piece of software on my phone and then it just, it just does it, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
It does the same thing on my Mac.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, but.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
If you have to do a manual, if you have no other choice, then
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you, you have no other choice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The one other thing I was going to mention, and uh, I don't know
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
if this is gonna be a problem for Mackenzie and Spencer, is I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A lot of times people keep reusing their same SD cards for their cameras.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
A lot of the other channels I watch, so I watch a lot of YouTube, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So a lot of them, right, they'll be like, oh, my SD card failed, or I lost
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
all my footage because the SD card died.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So you might also wanna periodically replace those, uh, cards, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
proactively rather than waiting for a failure because you might
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
lose your first copy of your video.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Before you even get a chance to put it on your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
laptop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And if, and if you are doing this for a business, uh, I would highly recommend
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
you look into a model of camera that records simultaneously to two SD cards.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Uh, because that, that basically also d helps deal
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with the, what you talked about.
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If you have one dye on you, at least it only dies on one
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of them and not the other one.
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hopefully.
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W. Curtis Preston: Hopefully double disc failures do happen.
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Um.
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Can we think of any other lessons that we can draw from these folks?
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I think no.
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I think just if it's important data to you, back it up.
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Right.
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Don't trust one copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Back it up
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W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
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And I, I would say that, um, we often say that the backup requirements and
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the backup design should be dictated by the business, and in this case.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
The business was making money, right?
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They, they were making a living doing this, and they really should
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have seen that data as the, it was, it was the product, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And the when you just have to think about that.
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Whatever you're doing that, that you're creating, that is, you
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know, your product then, um.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
That really needs to be backed up, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
And you need to figure out a way and, um, and hopefully not wait until like this
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kind of disaster happens before you start
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, yeah, and I think one of the quotes that
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they had at the very end was, this is never going to happen again.
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And I hope it never does, right.
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I hope that they never run into the
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W. Curtis Preston: It would be interesting to see if like, um, with, um, uh, was it.
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Was it, which one was it?
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Was it Deduce or was it, um.
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Which one was the one, they're like, okay, after this happens, we're
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doing this like 17 different way.
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That was Deduce, wasn't it?
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Deduce.
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W. Curtis Preston: So it'd be interesting to see if, you know, if they have a,
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like a, a like an overkill solution.
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The way Deuced did after it was like, okay, we're gonna replicate it here.
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We're gonna rep, we're gonna do realtime replication at three different
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locations, and then we're gonna have a historical snapshot, and then
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we're gonna store, you know, like we're gonna test recovery weekly.
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That all sounds good.
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Uh, it's just, um, um.
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Cost
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W. Curtis Preston: What's that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Yeah, it costs money and it's just also, it's a shame that you had to
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wait until you had a major disaster before you had a proper backup to sign.
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Yeah.
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W. Curtis Preston: So that's what we're just trying to, trying to, um, and then
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also, I'm just gonna add, you know.
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Uh, backup security, right?
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Just make sure that the, that at least one copy is stored in a way
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that if you do have some sort of cyber attack, um, that it's not
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gonna be able to take that copy out.
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And that is either via actual disconnected offline, actual air gapped storage,
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or via, uh, some sort of actual immutable storage as well, that even
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you can't delete if you, uh, wanted to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Right.
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So,
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Yep.
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W. Curtis Preston: all right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Well, you know, once again, a little information at the,
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at the misfortunes of others.
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But, um, you know, I.
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Um, that's a good story.
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I remember you, you sent me that link and I was like, oh, that really hurts.
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That really hurts.
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I, I really, you know, it's, it's the thing that I, my whole career, it's
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like anytime I see people that, that lose data where, where a, a relatively
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simple fix would have stopped that data loss, it hurts a lot to see that.
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So I don't want that to happen to any of our listeners.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
So, uh, listen up folks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Back that stuff up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Um, well thanks for the chat again, and thanks for the, thanks for the story.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
No, thank you Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
This was fun because like, you know, I watch a lot of YouTube
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and so it was nice to be able to talk about something that I watch.
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W. Curtis Preston: that's true.
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All right, uh, thanks to our listeners and, uh, be sure to subscribe
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
so you don't miss an episode.
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That is a wrap.
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The backup wrap up is written, recorded and produced by me w Curtis Preston.
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If you need backup or Dr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Consulting content generation or expert witness work,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
check out backup central.com.
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You can also find links from my O'Reilly Books on the same website.
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Remember, this is an independent podcast and any opinions that you
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hear are those of the speaker.
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And not necessarily an employer.
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Thanks for listening.
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