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 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 changing how you use your backup product, but a few of them may cause you to think about making a change. (Hint: if your backup product has been around for more than 20 years, it probably can't get away from some of the relics of the past.)
Mentioned in this episode:
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Like my friend, Jeff.
W. Curtis Preston:See you do cigars.
W. Curtis Preston:You get COVID.
W. Curtis Preston:That's it.
W. Curtis Preston:That's that's the lesson that
W. Curtis Preston:Jeff should learn.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis and I are not medical doctors.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We are not providing any medical advice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Please go talk to your doctor or do your research.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Thank you.
W. Curtis Preston:please don't get your medical advice on
W. Curtis Preston:Backup Central's Restore it All
W. Curtis Preston:hi and welcome to the Backup Central's Restore it All podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm your host.
W. Curtis Preston:W.
W. Curtis Preston:Curtis Preston AKA Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup and I have with me, my COVID isolation grief
W. Curtis Preston:consultant, Prasanna Malaiyandi
Prasanna Malaiyandi:oh, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, Curtis say it ain't so,
W. Curtis Preston:So I don't have COVID, but I just spent six
W. Curtis Preston:hours with Jeff who has COVID
Prasanna Malaiyandi:oh,
W. Curtis Preston:and I just got told, so I now have to isolate.
W. Curtis Preston:For the next few days, you know, and here's the thing I had a
W. Curtis Preston:trip planned, uh, and purchased.
W. Curtis Preston:And so, you know, Druva's uh new corporate office opens up this month.
W. Curtis Preston:So there's this big shindig.
W. Curtis Preston:Marketing department has their first, uh, like social gathering since COVID.
W. Curtis Preston:And I will be at neither of those things.
W. Curtis Preston:I will be at home hoping that I don't get COVID.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:When is the event supposed to be?
W. Curtis Preston:uh, Wednesday.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, you're not.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, I'm so sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sucks.
W. Curtis Preston:See, I knew that you would, you would console me in my grief.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I hope Jeff is feeling better or feeling OK.
W. Curtis Preston:I called him, you know, he, he texted me.
W. Curtis Preston:He's like, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So I have COVID and I call him.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, dude, like of all the weeks, you know, and you know, and you know,
W. Curtis Preston:not your fault, but of all the weeks.
W. Curtis Preston:And he goes, well, if it makes you feel any better, you did the same thing to me.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm like, oh yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause when he, he came over for Christmas dinner and then, uh, I tested positive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So since we're talking about, uh, isolate, not isolation,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but sort of needing grief from sympathy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I think I called you over the weekend and told you how I had food
Prasanna Malaiyandi:poisoning, which was not a fun thing at all, but I'm happy to say that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I feel much, much, much better.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It was like 12 hours in my system felt awful.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But back to normal.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I, think that might be the second time I've ever had food poisoning,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I've had it more than that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, and you may recall I had it last year.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Which is why I called you for advice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm like, Curtis, what do I do?
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It's more like, I'm like, go get a big greasy hamburger.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I just tried to spill the tea on my desk.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, technically I did spill the tea on my desk.
W. Curtis Preston:I just didn't spill all of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So have
W. Curtis Preston:me while
Prasanna Malaiyandi:gotten tested yet or you're waiting
W. Curtis Preston:no, I haven't tested yet.
W. Curtis Preston:It's kind of a waste to test this early.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I've got tests.
W. Curtis Preston:I'll, I'll wait a couple of days.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and then test and I'm probably fine.
W. Curtis Preston:I probably don't have it.
W. Curtis Preston:And if I do have it, um, I will have a mild case, but, uh, like the
W. Curtis Preston:one I had back in December, but.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't need to go to a large unmasked gathering
W. Curtis Preston:of people right now, which is I don't want to be typhoid Mary.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm glad you're taking the initiative though.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Not to go because I'm sure there are a lot of people in your position
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or you'd be like, yeah, it's fine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'll just go.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm uh, well, Jeff's wife, um, actually got on a plane before he found out.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, obviously she spent lots of time with him and then she
W. Curtis Preston:got on a plane this morning to go visit her relatives in Florida.
W. Curtis Preston:And, you know, he notified her like in the air.
W. Curtis Preston:So he's like, well, I guess you're going to be masking up
W. Curtis Preston:when you're around your family.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, it stinks cause you know, and the thing is,
W. Curtis Preston:again, I'll be fine if I get it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I mean, due to both the vaccine and also,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Having had it back in December
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I've had it and I should be fine, but I don't
W. Curtis Preston:want to be the person who gives it to somebody else where it might have,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, much more negative effects.
W. Curtis Preston:So I'm going to take the precautionary stuff and it stinks.
W. Curtis Preston:I literally found out like, as my daughter was stopping by the house
W. Curtis Preston:and I'm like, yeah, by the way, I'm not going to come say hi to you.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause, cause I got, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, well, be responsible.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Be good.
W. Curtis Preston:Be be responsible.
W. Curtis Preston:Nope.
W. Curtis Preston:No, that's not.
W. Curtis Preston:No, that doesn't make a good cheer.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No,
W. Curtis Preston:No.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, uh, I threw out the Druva name, saw throw that out again,
W. Curtis Preston:that a, this is a, that Prasanna and I worked for different companies.
W. Curtis Preston:He works for Zoom.
W. Curtis Preston:I work for Druva that's opening up a new.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, corporate office that I won't be visiting, but this is
W. Curtis Preston:not a podcast of either company.
W. Curtis Preston:The opinions that you hear are ours, and you're going to get some opinions.
W. Curtis Preston:This episode, I'll tell you, you will get some opinions,
W. Curtis Preston:some very strong ones from me.
W. Curtis Preston:And then, uh, also, uh, please rate this podcast at ratethispodcast.com/restore.
W. Curtis Preston:If you're listening to us on iTunes, just scroll down to the bottom,
W. Curtis Preston:click some stars, make us a comment.
W. Curtis Preston:Do all the things, you know, it just helps us to, to get the word out.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, and then also if you're interested in the kind of things we're
W. Curtis Preston:interested, we want to have you on just reach out to me at what's that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Come on the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:Come on the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:We love new people, you know, um, even if they say mean things like the one that,
W. Curtis Preston:that we had last week, the one that got published today, the backup is evil.
W. Curtis Preston:That was an interesting, uh, the first few minutes were rough.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, cause cause he was really just slamming down on backup,
W. Curtis Preston:but, uh, that was a good episode.
W. Curtis Preston:The backup is evil episode is a good one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you don't have to always agree with us.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's totally fine.
W. Curtis Preston:and you know, it would be nice to you, even if you think
W. Curtis Preston:that, uh, for example, I'm going to make some really emphatic emphatical
W. Curtis Preston:emphatic, emphatic, emphatic statements.
W. Curtis Preston:This, this podcast, if you think that one or more of them are wrong,
W. Curtis Preston:come on, we'll talk to you, right.
W. Curtis Preston:We'll be nice.
W. Curtis Preston:We promise.
W. Curtis Preston:It's virtual.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not like we can, uh, will Smith you, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, uh, might be too soon.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis might be too soon.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, yeah, I, you know, I went the thing with Jeff.
W. Curtis Preston:We went to the academy museum again and saw a showing of the French connection
W. Curtis Preston:introduced by the director of the French connection, which was amazing.
W. Curtis Preston:He's 87 years old.
W. Curtis Preston:It was an amazing thing.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't have time to go into it, but I will say that he opened the thing
W. Curtis Preston:by saying it's so great to be here.
W. Curtis Preston:At the, uh, academy of motion pictures, a place known for, uh, will Smith.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh,
W. Curtis Preston:He's like too soon?
W. Curtis Preston:Too soon?
W. Curtis Preston:The sense of humor and, and cognitive abilities of this 87 year old guy.
W. Curtis Preston:They were great.
W. Curtis Preston:It was just awesome.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway, so I, you know, the, I was inspired by the backup is evil episode,
W. Curtis Preston:and I wanted to have a little bit another episode that delves into some
W. Curtis Preston:of the things that we covered there, but, but just, um, because he was,
W. Curtis Preston:he was very much heading towards.
W. Curtis Preston:Obviously obvi, uh, the NetApp way of doing things, which is block
W. Curtis Preston:level replication, incremental, incremental block level forever,
W. Curtis Preston:and replication not backup.
W. Curtis Preston:And let me just take a, take a moment to define what's different between
W. Curtis Preston:backup and replication and for me and I don't, and I don't mean, I don't mean
W. Curtis Preston:like snapshots and replication, what.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:know, what's going on in my head.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Remember you sent me, uh, the Reddit.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:A meme about with, uh, Chris rock and will Smith, where it was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like, snapshots is not backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And there was,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:That one.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's what that's what was going on in my head.
W. Curtis Preston:that's funny.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not so much snapshots versus backup.
W. Curtis Preston:It's replication versus backup.
W. Curtis Preston:One big difference between what he was recommending.
W. Curtis Preston:So he, he made this point of saying, Um, you know, the whole world based
W. Curtis Preston:basically he, if he had his druthers, the entire world would move all
W. Curtis Preston:their storage onto NetApp storage.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you get basically backup and replication, storage, and primary and
W. Curtis Preston:secondary and all that all in one thing.
W. Curtis Preston:And he, but he acknowledged that that's only roughly 15% of the world.
W. Curtis Preston:So I'm saying, all right, let's talk to the rest of the world.
W. Curtis Preston:You're not going to move everything to, to, to net app or you're not, you,
W. Curtis Preston:you're not even going to use if you've got a NetApp like architecture and you
W. Curtis Preston:could be using snapshots and replication, but you don't, you haven't been able
W. Curtis Preston:to convince your boss to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:You're going to use backup instead.
W. Curtis Preston:So I just want to, before we discuss backup, I just want to point my hands
W. Curtis Preston:are really going to really going today before we discuss back up.
W. Curtis Preston:I just wanted to say.
W. Curtis Preston:What's the difference between a backup and what that does because I would, I would I,
W. Curtis Preston:if you replicate snapshots to a secondary array, I would call that a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Some would not, or at least it's a, it's an element of backup, but what I'm
W. Curtis Preston:differentiating here is when you make a copy into some other format, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It's not all within.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, uh, and typically when we say backup, although I do not, I am not
W. Curtis Preston:this, um, whatever the opposite of all encompassing, I'm not this pedantic.
W. Curtis Preston:If you will,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not just talking about tape backup.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not just talking about traditional.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, like let's say Veritas NetBackup or, or Dell networker, that style.
W. Curtis Preston:CommVault, it's not just that.
W. Curtis Preston:I would also consider, you know, our competitors like Rubrik, Cohesity,
W. Curtis Preston:Veeam, Clumio, these are all backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, but what I thought we would do is talk about things that we
W. Curtis Preston:should absolutely stop doing, right.
W. Curtis Preston:That if you're still doing these things, you should really
W. Curtis Preston:seriously consider a change.
W. Curtis Preston:That was quite the build up quite a, quite a rant.
W. Curtis Preston:And I haven't even said anything yet.
W. Curtis Preston:What do you think?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:no, I think so.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I just wanted two points of clarification from you.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, the first is, we're not saying that replication
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is evil or snapshots is a place in your environment, depending on your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:needs and objectives to have those mechanisms, but it does not truly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:replace backup and the sorts of things
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that, protects against.
W. Curtis Preston:well, that's a different discussion,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, but I just want to be clear though, that
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:That's not, that's not the point I'm trying to make.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just trying to say you're using a backup product.
W. Curtis Preston:And I want to talk about some of the same concepts that he talked about.
W. Curtis Preston:But in the backup context, cause he was living in this world where you have
W. Curtis Preston:assued backup and in favor of net, you know, I'm not saying I don't even want
W. Curtis Preston:to have the discussion on, I mean, maybe we will on a different episode on
W. Curtis Preston:what's the difference between, I just wanted to differentiate between the two.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not saying one is bad or better.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just saying your you're listening to this episode because
W. Curtis Preston:you're using a backup product.
W. Curtis Preston:And I want to talk about things that you shouldn't be doing anymore.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm good with that.
W. Curtis Preston:So you really only asked one question.
W. Curtis Preston:You had like three.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well, I had two.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:My second question and maybe we might get to it when we're talking.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You also mentioned that you made the point about it should be in a different format,
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And
W. Curtis Preston:In order to fall into this definition, that's all I'm saying.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not, I'm not making.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, there is a judgment call.
W. Curtis Preston:That is a different discussion.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just trying to just delineate it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The only reason I was asking is typically a lot of backup products
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that might be doing native format backups don't really modify the format.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And
W. Curtis Preston:don't modify it, but they store it in a different way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So It's but
W. Curtis Preston:not just a replicated, like, again, it's easier to say what,
W. Curtis Preston:what, what isn't so NetApp SnapMirror, you know, snapshots and SnapMirror that
W. Curtis Preston:doesn't fit this definition because it's the exact same thing on both sides,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but if someone was scp from one Linux box to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:another Linux box and copying the data that would be considered
W. Curtis Preston:That would be something different.
W. Curtis Preston:Generally, it will change formats, but not always.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:I know for example, Veeam tends to store data in a way.
W. Curtis Preston:And actually I think Rubrik and Cohesity do as well.
W. Curtis Preston:They store data in a way that it can be accessed.
W. Curtis Preston:But, but it's just about, again, it's about changing the manner
W. Curtis Preston:in which the data is stored.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I just looking
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:don't have a better way.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, that's okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:So,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:should we be stopped doing
W. Curtis Preston:well, the first thing I'm going to talk about is tape,
W. Curtis Preston:and I'm sorry to my tape friends.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But you're Mr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Back up?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, but see backup doesn't mean tape.
W. Curtis Preston:It has for many, many years.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and, and, and it's sure meant that to, to, to Ricky on that episode,
W. Curtis Preston:but backup doesn't mean tape to me.
W. Curtis Preston:And it hasn't for a long time.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not saying do away with tape, but here's what, here's
W. Curtis Preston:what we have to do away with.
W. Curtis Preston:And w, and again, everything I say has exceptions.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Everything I say has exceptions.
W. Curtis Preston:There are reasons why you might want to continue doing things, but as
W. Curtis Preston:a general rule, I don't think that most companies should be backing up
W. Curtis Preston:from a server directly to a tape.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:That design hasn't been a good design for 15 years.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe more it's because of that problem that we've talked about before, it's
W. Curtis Preston:the tape speed mismatch problem.
W. Curtis Preston:The tape wants to go too fast and you want to go, your backup wants to
W. Curtis Preston:go really slow and the only way to.
W. Curtis Preston:To address that speed mismatch is to do massive levels of
W. Curtis Preston:multiplexing, where you're, where you're putting data together.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, in order to, to generate a stream of data fast enough to
W. Curtis Preston:keep that tape drive happy.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And we'll talk about multiplexing in a bit.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, it's funny as you're saying
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that we should stop doing tape.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was just going back and thinking how many episodes on this podcast
Prasanna Malaiyandi:have we actually talked about tape?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I agree with you though, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That there is a use case per tape.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And there is improvements in the technology, but just like you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:said, using tape in, in general using tape as your first copy
W. Curtis Preston:As your initial copy is very problematic.
W. Curtis Preston:We can have a different discussion as to whether or not it makes a good
W. Curtis Preston:secondary copy or a doomsday copy.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:So, Brian, right, Brian came on and Brian made a good.
W. Curtis Preston:Case Brian Greenberg and his, his coworker whose name I forgot, but
W. Curtis Preston:I've known what's that Cameron.
W. Curtis Preston:Thank you.
W. Curtis Preston:They, they, they made a good case for tape for, for a copy on tape.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not saying tape is bad.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just saying tape is really, really bad at receiving incremental
W. Curtis Preston:backups unless you've spooled them all to some fast disk first.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you're just copying all those backups over.
W. Curtis Preston:That's what I mean.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:can I.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I know this will probably fall under that in general, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:here might be an exception case.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, would it change?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So if, depending on what you're backing up, for instance, if you're backing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:up object store which not many people probably do, but maybe in that instance,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:would it make sense to go to tape?
W. Curtis Preston:All of my recommendation is based on.
W. Curtis Preston:How lousy incremental backups are to tape.
W. Curtis Preston:If you have a scenario where you don't have this problem, I don't care.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't have a problem with the reliability of tape.
W. Curtis Preston:I have a problem with it's in compatibility with the
W. Curtis Preston:way incremental backups run.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Gotcha.
W. Curtis Preston:I I'm even okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe for using them for full backups.
W. Curtis Preston:If, if you've got a scenario where you can make that happen, many environments,
W. Curtis Preston:they just can't even do full backups or just, you know, they've got a 10
W. Curtis Preston:exabyte storage system, how are you going to do a full backup on that?
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:You you're just not.
W. Curtis Preston:And so, but if you can, if you can do a full backup to tape, that's
W. Curtis Preston:possibly a way to use tape in your environment, but generally speaking,
W. Curtis Preston:but then it complicates things.
W. Curtis Preston:We're going to do full backups to tape, but incrementals to desk.
W. Curtis Preston:And we're, you
W. Curtis Preston:know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Managing.
W. Curtis Preston:I'd much rather you just simplify things
W. Curtis Preston:and use, use disk for everything.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, uh, although we're gonna, we're going to come back to disk as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:since you touched on tape and continuing along that train
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of thought, you brought up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:multiplexing.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, multiplexing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I know in the previous tape conversations, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's kind of the only way to actually keep tape happy, but like, you've like, we've
Prasanna Malaiyandi:also talked about in previous podcasts, It's great for doing backups, but when
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you have to do restores, that's where things just go really, really, really
Prasanna Malaiyandi:bad.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, because basically you have to read the whole
W. Curtis Preston:tape and throw away 90% of it, or, or maybe even 95 or more percent of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Now I know of at least one product, their name is escaping me.
W. Curtis Preston:It might be, no, I don't want to say that.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't want to say the name.
W. Curtis Preston:See, you heard that notification share the notification.
W. Curtis Preston:I have do not.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, you, you probably did because you didn't because I got a unidirectional mic,
W. Curtis Preston:but slack just gave me a notification.
W. Curtis Preston:So what I have do not disturb for everything on.
W. Curtis Preston:So why is slacking beeping on my computer anyway?
W. Curtis Preston:I'm sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:I digress, but that's what happens.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause I got a squirrel.
W. Curtis Preston:What were we talking about?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Multiplexing
W. Curtis Preston:Oh yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:there's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a tape vendor.
W. Curtis Preston:Multiplexing before we talk about multiplexer.
W. Curtis Preston:Let me just round out about tape again.
W. Curtis Preston:I think tape there's an argument to be made for using it as a secondary
W. Curtis Preston:copy as a way for creating a backup to send off site mostly in smaller
W. Curtis Preston:environments though, because when they get big using tape as a DR mechanism,
W. Curtis Preston:I think is really problematic,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:um, and also using it for long-term storage, there's a
W. Curtis Preston:really, really good argument there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And archive is not backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Correct.
W. Curtis Preston:Is it, did you have another comment you want to make?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, I was just going to talk about, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Tape makes perfect sense in an archiving sense as
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Active
Prasanna Malaiyandi:different than
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so, yeah, so let's go back to multiplexing .Multiplexing.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a bit like, have you ever heard that?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I dunno if this is one of those like fake quotes, but uh, I think.
W. Curtis Preston:Th my memory is that it's Winston Churchill that allegedly said democracy
W. Curtis Preston:is the worst form of government.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just better than the other ones.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, something like that.
W. Curtis Preston:And multiplexing is the worst backup technology ever.
W. Curtis Preston:It just was really helpful in solving a particular problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:It was, it was a, it was a necessary evil because tape drives were getting
W. Curtis Preston:faster and faster, faster, and we didn't, we didn't yet have multiplexing.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:We didn't yet have deduplication,
W. Curtis Preston:which, which is what allowed us to use disk.
W. Curtis Preston:So stop using tape and multiplexing and use disk and deduplication.
W. Curtis Preston:And you know, that solves that problem.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It solves on problem
W. Curtis Preston:solves one problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:We're gonna, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:disk creates another problem.
W. Curtis Preston:We'll get to that in a minute.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But here's
W. Curtis Preston:The next
W. Curtis Preston:thing,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:before we jump.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So even with the multiplexing and tape backup, are there any products other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:than tape, are there other displays products that use multiplexing?
W. Curtis Preston:No, because there's absolutely no reason
W. Curtis Preston:to use multiplexing on desk.
W. Curtis Preston:And by the way, if, if I'm wrong, uh, then that's the dumbest product
W. Curtis Preston:in the history of dumb products.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:The, oh, what I was saying before I got interrupted by the slack thing is
W. Curtis Preston:there is at least one backup product that does multiplexing differently.
W. Curtis Preston:It sort of spools.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know if it does it in Ram or if it does it in flash or disk or
W. Curtis Preston:whatever, but it does multiplexing in such a way that they put big
W. Curtis Preston:segments on the tape contiguously.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they're able to read, seek, read, seek rather than what most backup
W. Curtis Preston:products do, which is read everything and just throw away everything.
W. Curtis Preston:It doesn't need.
W. Curtis Preston:There's that, but just tape and multiplexing, that's just gotta stop.
W. Curtis Preston:Like if you're doing tape and multiplexing, you really have to stop.
W. Curtis Preston:It is a horrible, horrible way.
W. Curtis Preston:And if you're like, well, how am I going to make my tape drives happy?
W. Curtis Preston:Stop using them.
W. Curtis Preston:That's how right.
W. Curtis Preston:Use them for secondary copies.
W. Curtis Preston:Use them to create a copy to hand, to hand to iron mountain.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:So the next
W. Curtis Preston:one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Have you caught in that all out of your system?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, the tape thing, the next is, and this is
W. Curtis Preston:what we talked a lot about with Ricky and that is full backups.
W. Curtis Preston:And by that, I mean, repeated full backups, occasional, regular, full
W. Curtis Preston:backups once a week, once a month, once a quarter, once a year, I don't
W. Curtis Preston:care how often you're doing them.
W. Curtis Preston:They're dumb.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's where Ricky and I, a hundred percent agree the idea
W. Curtis Preston:of moving everything from a to B.
W. Curtis Preston:'cause that's why we've always done it is the dumbest idea.
W. Curtis Preston:Again, it was a great idea back in the day, because we were using tape
W. Curtis Preston:and if you're using tape, you do need to do the occasional, full backup or
W. Curtis Preston:else the restore can take forever.
W. Curtis Preston:And you know, there are backup products that have this problem.
W. Curtis Preston:I won't name them specifically, although Ricky didn't have a problem.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I agree with you because it doesn't make sense,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:especially when you also have deduplicated disk where you're going to throw away
Prasanna Malaiyandi:90% of it, the full backup anyway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Why even occupy the additional network, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That you need in order to be able to move all the data, plus all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of the compute and the storage
W. Curtis Preston:well, the compute and everything on, on the, on the,
W. Curtis Preston:on the side that you're doing it.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And, but I do have a question
Prasanna Malaiyandi:whether it's.
W. Curtis Preston:You know that whenever you say a bunch of stuff, and
W. Curtis Preston:then you say, but you just dismissed everything you said before the but, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I totally agree with, we should never do full
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backups,
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:So
W. Curtis Preston:you have a concern, you know, you pause, you just pause, you agree.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you say, I have a concern.
W. Curtis Preston:So you, that way you don't negate everything that you said before.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I have a
W. Curtis Preston:I'm really good at arguing.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just saying, this is, this is a skill that I picked up when you
W. Curtis Preston:say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
W. Curtis Preston:But, or however you just dismissed everything that you just said.
W. Curtis Preston:So now I've learned to say, I agree with what you said about tape, not
W. Curtis Preston:or about not doing full backups, the concern I have C you on that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, much better.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm teaching you how to argue.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The concern I have is for.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Applications and certain workloads.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think you can't get away from never doing full backups.
W. Curtis Preston:That is a valid statement.
W. Curtis Preston:In fact, the product that Ricky mentioned, they only do forever
W. Curtis Preston:incrementals on file systems.
W. Curtis Preston:They don't do.
W. Curtis Preston:Forever incremental on databases.
W. Curtis Preston:If your database basically doesn't know how to not do a full backup, you
W. Curtis Preston:have to do the occasional full backup.
W. Curtis Preston:There are ways around.
W. Curtis Preston:So like for example, the most popular of those databases would be Oracle and
W. Curtis Preston:there is a way to do forever incremental with Oracle and hardly anybody uses it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:The idea of the image copy and,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Oracle incremental merge.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, Oracle incremental margin.
W. Curtis Preston:We should cover that on podcasts, but that on the list,
W. Curtis Preston:we'll cover that on a podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I think it's a great way to do you.
W. Curtis Preston:You end up with a copy of Oracle.
W. Curtis Preston:You end up with multiple copies of Oracle on disc, that multiple versions, if you
W. Curtis Preston:will, of Oracle on disk and each of them only takes up the incremental new blocks.
W. Curtis Preston:So it's a really good way to do incremental forever.
W. Curtis Preston:You don't like incremental forever with what don't you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't, there are some downsides to using Oracle incremental
Prasanna Malaiyandi:merge, especially when it comes to integrating with other applications.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, because when it comes to integrating with your native backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:applications, uh, because it's not fully supporting of the streaming.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Transferred the SBT library that Oracle has, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's completely managed separately and all the rest.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So it makes it a little bit more complex to manage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I agree with you that there are a lot of great use cases with Oracle incremental
Prasanna Malaiyandi:merge and doing backups in that format and being able to just, get the incrementals.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, and then there is also a second downside of Oracle incremental
Prasanna Malaiyandi:merge, which we can talk about in a separate podcast, which is you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:actually have to read the data back in order to apply the incremental
W. Curtis Preston:right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But we can
Prasanna Malaiyandi:say that for another
W. Curtis Preston:there are, yeah, there are exceptions, dare
W. Curtis Preston:exceptions, just like everything.
W. Curtis Preston:There are exceptions to the rule and obviously if your application forces you
W. Curtis Preston:to do full, so then you got to do fulls.
W. Curtis Preston:What I'm talking about is using a backup product that it
W. Curtis Preston:doesn't know how to not do it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like VMs, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:VMs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You should never be doing full backup daily.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's ridiculous.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And if the, and there are some products that say, well, we don't force a full,
W. Curtis Preston:we just do a sink, a synthetic full, honestly, that's not much better.
W. Curtis Preston:It's it's a little better, but it's the same thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Your backup product is not yet in the 21st century, your backup product
W. Curtis Preston:still thinks it needs a full backup.
W. Curtis Preston:And so you're going to create a full backup and by the way, synthetic
W. Curtis Preston:fulls have limitations themselves.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:I don't want to go down that route, but maybe we add that to the list.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, we should talk about synthetic foals versus real fulls.
W. Curtis Preston:But, yeah, I'm just saying in general, if you're still using a backup product
W. Curtis Preston:that forces you to do an occasional full, however, often that occasional
W. Curtis Preston:and whether or not it's synthetic, I'm just saying that should just stop full
W. Curtis Preston:backups unless when you're forced to do so, should be a thing of the past.
W. Curtis Preston:It's all I'm saying.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:And re huh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I agree with you.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay right after that.
W. Curtis Preston:And again, unless you don't have any other choice
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:is full file, incremental backups.
W. Curtis Preston:What do I mean by that?
W. Curtis Preston:There is, there are so many products that, well, there are products that.
W. Curtis Preston:Can do block level incremental backup on those files.
W. Curtis Preston:The idea of backing up an entire file, just because one byte of that
W. Curtis Preston:file has changed is another dumb idea whose time should go away.
W. Curtis Preston:And if your backup product doesn't know how to do block level
W. Curtis Preston:incremental backups or source side deduplication, so that you're, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, you're doing it that way.
W. Curtis Preston:And by the way, replication is a way to do it.
W. Curtis Preston:So if your product doesn't know how to do that, and you're still backing up the,
W. Curtis Preston:it's an order of magnitude difference in the size of an incremental backup.
W. Curtis Preston:You're looking at 10 to 15% versus 1% of the, of the size.
W. Curtis Preston:Like just, I mean, that's a total made up number, but it's based on my experience.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, what do you think about that one full file incrementals?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think just to put more context for users.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Don't think of the case where you have a word document and a byte changes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Think about also large files that might be in your system, that you are constantly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backing up day after, day after day.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And if those, if you make a small change to it, that causes the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:entire file to be backed up again,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right?
W. Curtis Preston:PST files coming to mind.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:And similar files like that large files that
W. Curtis Preston:get a little bit of change each day.
W. Curtis Preston:And if you have a full file incremental, backup you back up the entire thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I agree with you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:There's no reason that you should be copying that entire file and backing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:up that entire file every single time.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's the next, one's going to harken back to the earlier discussion
W. Curtis Preston:because I was like, I want you to stop storing your backups on tape.
W. Curtis Preston:Now.
W. Curtis Preston:I want you to stop storing your backups on disk by that.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Turn is Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, Directly accessible disc, an SMB
W. Curtis Preston:Mount, or an NFS Mount, a windows server with some DAS, right.
W. Curtis Preston:That's direct attached storage.
W. Curtis Preston:So just regular old JBOD or a disk array or whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:An NFS mounted data domain or quantum or whatever, whatever box you're using.
W. Curtis Preston:If it's, if the backups are directly accessible in the operating system
W. Curtis Preston:of the backup server, this is what I, what we have to stop.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and why is that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well, because it now becomes easily accessible for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:ransomware and other people to go blow away, encrypt your backups, and now
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you can't restore your environment.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just one more point on that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's uh, shoot.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I lost my train of thought.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, you said backup server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think you could also be from any client as well accessing that server.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, any, any server that has direct
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:read-write access to the backups, you are right?
W. Curtis Preston:That there are some backup configurations where the backup client writes directly
W. Curtis Preston:to the storage, not via like a protocol.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, unless we're talking about NFS or SMB is the protocol.
W. Curtis Preston:If there, if they can, if they have read, write access directly
W. Curtis Preston:to the backups and yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Especially with all these network protocols,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:most backup vendors, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Have a proprietary protocol or a proprietary connection for actually
Prasanna Malaiyandi:writing the data to the storage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So you really shouldn't be using open protocols.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or I want to, I wonder if we could even extend it and say, even if you are using
Prasanna Malaiyandi:something that is open, you probably want a really, really, really good way
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to secure it and limit the attack scope.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's not ideal.
W. Curtis Preston:that's a great point.
W. Curtis Preston:And because.
W. Curtis Preston:If the backup server, I'm sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:If the backup software administrative accounts are compromised, it doesn't
W. Curtis Preston:matter how you wrote the backups on that disc, whether you used a protocol or not,
W. Curtis Preston:you can go in and delete those backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:However, the exception to that would be if you've
W. Curtis Preston:written it to storage, that is truly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Immutable
W. Curtis Preston:Immutable.
W. Curtis Preston:So if you, uh, if you're unable to delete the backups, even if you have
W. Curtis Preston:administrative access, then that would, that would solve this problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:But this is, this is the thing you have to look at now, look at the
W. Curtis Preston:attack surface that you have, look at how you're writing backups, find
W. Curtis Preston:out if there is a more secure way to store your disk-based backups.
W. Curtis Preston:In most cases, the answer is almost always yes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so this goes back to one of those exception cases, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So you have to do your due diligence to ensure that everything is protected
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and secured in the right way before sort of saying, yeah, I'm just going
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to write all my backups via NFS or SMB.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't have a problem with like using disk as sort of a caching mechanism.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Especially if you're using tape.
W. Curtis Preston:So it's not that writing backups to directly accessible disk
W. Curtis Preston:is necessarily an evil thing.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just that if that's the only way you're writing backups, it's
W. Curtis Preston:a really, really insecure way.
W. Curtis Preston:If it's one of your many copies, I don't have a problem.
W. Curtis Preston:But, uh, if, uh, unless you have another option, if you have another
W. Curtis Preston:option, a more secure way than use that way, that's all I'm saying.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And there are also other benefits for some of these
Prasanna Malaiyandi:protocols, because it allows things like source-side deduplication and helping
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you efficient or save bandwidth, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:By not sending all the data and getting tossed on the storage side.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and, uh, you know, I'll, I'll put this out.
W. Curtis Preston:That yes.
W. Curtis Preston:The way that Druva stores, the backups meets this definition, meaning that
W. Curtis Preston:it never stores the backups in a, in a way that, you know, we do have a cloud
W. Curtis Preston:cache that you can optionally use.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not required, but you can, in that case, you may have a
W. Curtis Preston:local copy of your data, um, that is also stored to the cloud, but
W. Curtis Preston:the main working reference copy.
W. Curtis Preston:If you will.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the copy of record is stored in the cloud and it's stored in object
W. Curtis Preston:storage and is stored in an account that you don't have any access to it's as
W. Curtis Preston:it's as removed as it could be from you without actually putting it on a tape
W. Curtis Preston:and then handing it to a man in a van.
W. Curtis Preston:So we're not the only ones that do that.
W. Curtis Preston:We're not, and that's not the only way to do that, but I'm just saying.
W. Curtis Preston:That is a way to solve this problem is to just not use disk.
W. Curtis Preston:Not use regular disk, uh, regular backup servers, uh, at all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You know, you should get t-shirts printed with that,
W. Curtis Preston:What
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:not the man in the van
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:or way.
W. Curtis Preston:not the man in the van.
W. Curtis Preston:I like it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so the last thing I wanted to talk about, and this is
W. Curtis Preston:another age old practice.
W. Curtis Preston:Is an, and it's an age old practice with even more experienced than, than some of
W. Curtis Preston:the other ones that we've talked about.
W. Curtis Preston:And that is this idea of waiting for the disaster or the attack
W. Curtis Preston:to start your disaster recovery.
W. Curtis Preston:And by that, I mean, when I think back to my early days, RDR our DR as I.
W. Curtis Preston:As I make quotes, DR plan was a box and a tape and a set of
W. Curtis Preston:instructions, and we never had to fire it in anger, as I say, right.
W. Curtis Preston:We never had to actually use it because we got a flood or a
W. Curtis Preston:hurricane or a terrorist attack, or obviously not a ransomware attack.
W. Curtis Preston:But I know that if we had actually done that, we would have been down
W. Curtis Preston:for ages because I know that it took us an entire weekend to restore the,
W. Curtis Preston:the, just the one or two servers that we would do on a, on a DR test.
W. Curtis Preston:And so what I'm saying is that it used to be that.
W. Curtis Preston:Only the high end companies, only the financial trading firms or whatever,
W. Curtis Preston:where they could put downtime measured in millions of dollars an hour.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:We lose a million dollars an hour.
W. Curtis Preston:If we're down.
W. Curtis Preston:Those were the folks that had the super HA stuff and the hot, the hot standby site
W. Curtis Preston:and all that stuff that we used to have.
W. Curtis Preston:What I'm saying is that's no longer the case.
W. Curtis Preston:It's no, there are too many options for you to be able to have a disaster recovery
W. Curtis Preston:plan that is ransomware friendly so that you should be able to restore your data.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and have it essentially restored for you ready to go in a disaster.
W. Curtis Preston:That's what I'm saying.
W. Curtis Preston:If you're just waiting for the restore to happen, you say, then we're
W. Curtis Preston:going to do our disaster recovery.
W. Curtis Preston:What I'm saying is don't do it that way.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm saying use one of the methods that allows you to restore the
W. Curtis Preston:data before it's ever needed.
W. Curtis Preston:You, you have this hot standby copy ready to go, and this will
W. Curtis Preston:definitely be in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:That's the whole point of this is that.
W. Curtis Preston:Because of the cloud, you don't have to pay for the compute infrastructure
W. Curtis Preston:until you need to actually test it.
W. Curtis Preston:All you have to pay for is the backup copy.
W. Curtis Preston:That's essentially ready to go.
W. Curtis Preston:Not, not sitting there in backup format or anything like that.
W. Curtis Preston:It needs to be ready to go.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, that's what I'm talking about.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think because of the cloud and other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:technologies that have come out, it's now become a lot more affordable
Prasanna Malaiyandi:before, like you said, there weren't any options, unless you had millions
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and millions of dollars in your budget.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Now you can get a DR copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's good enough to deal with a lot of the ransomware
Prasanna Malaiyandi:scenarios and other things, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That is affordable for most organizations.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So go take a look at things out there.
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'll, I'll throw out a few random things.
W. Curtis Preston:We don't need to cover them.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, these are more like ma maybe, maybe, maybe.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I'm going to come back, run back to you.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe we'll do an episode.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's do an episode things you better be doing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:These are things you should definitely no longer be doing.
W. Curtis Preston:We'll talk about things that you better be doing.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, one of them being, um, MFA.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah, I have one for you should stop doing this.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, you should stop running your backup apps
Prasanna Malaiyandi:as root and your agents as root.
W. Curtis Preston:So you mean administering them as root?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:At both administering or even having agents
Prasanna Malaiyandi:being run as root in your environment,
W. Curtis Preston:Well, my only concern of that is like in a Unix environment,
W. Curtis Preston:it has to run as UID zero in order to get the, the power that it needs or the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but not always, not all ways as
W. Curtis Preston:What would you do?
W. Curtis Preston:Other than that, it runs a system or root, like in order to get the
W. Curtis Preston:permissions, to be able to see everything in a Unix world in a windows world
W. Curtis Preston:has to run is the equivalent of Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Administrator.
W. Curtis Preston:And what I'm saying is you could make another user ID, but in the
W. Curtis Preston:Unix world, it would still have UID.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And so, but, and so I'm, I agree with your recommendation.
W. Curtis Preston:I just want to just slightly, uh, massage it to mean if you are logging in as
W. Curtis Preston:root or something, equivalent to root or administrator, and you're running your
W. Curtis Preston:backup, you're running your backup system.
W. Curtis Preston:That way that is absolutely wrong.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I would also say though, in the case where you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:don't need to be running your agent as root, that it should not be running
Prasanna Malaiyandi:as root because not all cases need
W. Curtis Preston:Agreed.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know what those, I don't know what those cases are.
W. Curtis Preston:Give me an example of a case.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:for database backups, you don't need to be running as root.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I made that up in my head, as I was saying,
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, oh, he's probably talking about database backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:If the agent doesn't have to run as root then correct, don't run it as root
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yup.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, apply the concept of least privilege to your backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yup.
W. Curtis Preston:And we should put that, you know, MFA, least privilege.
W. Curtis Preston:We'll talk about those in are things you should be doing episode.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:do you think we've yelled at people enough?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think so
W. Curtis Preston:This is a very angry episode.
W. Curtis Preston:Stop doing this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well, it would be interesting to see how many people
Prasanna Malaiyandi:are using tools that actually do this,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or
W. Curtis Preston:It would be interesting.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I would say still the bulk of the backup world is doing, using backup
W. Curtis Preston:products that still do full backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:That still force an occasional full backup,
W. Curtis Preston:even if it's a synthetic one.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Think about it, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Net backup, networker.
W. Curtis Preston:Commvault.
W. Curtis Preston:Not TSM, uh, ArcServe, I mean, you know, pick, pick a backup product
W. Curtis Preston:that's been around for 20 years or more, it's doing occasional full backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:It's only backup products that have been designed in
W. Curtis Preston:the last 10 years or so, which would include Veeam would include, actually
W. Curtis Preston:seems a little older than that, but, but the rubric Cohesity Druva.
W. Curtis Preston:Trying to think Clumio , these are products that, that they're
W. Curtis Preston:like, basically they're the, they're the disk generation.
W. Curtis Preston:They're, they're making an assumption.
W. Curtis Preston:We're going to store backups on disk or something behaving like disc.
W. Curtis Preston:And so therefore the idea of a full backup is just dumb.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:bonkers.
W. Curtis Preston:And so let's not do it.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's let's design, let's design a backup product from the beginning
W. Curtis Preston:to not need a full backup.
W. Curtis Preston:A repeated full backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Obviously we always
W. Curtis Preston:always need
Prasanna Malaiyandi:At least
W. Curtis Preston:backup,
W. Curtis Preston:just one, one, and done baby one and done just like, no, I was just going
W. Curtis Preston:to try to make a go go North Carolina.
W. Curtis Preston:You don't even know.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause you don't follow NCAA.
W. Curtis Preston:You follow, you don't really follow basketball.
W. Curtis Preston:You follow football.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Nope.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I just follow football.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the NFL.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, North Carolina won over Duke this past weekend.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It was an upset
W. Curtis Preston:It was an upset.
W. Curtis Preston:And you know, and the guy, the coach that, you know, the coach ended his
W. Curtis Preston:career on a loss, which is a shame, but he's had an amazing career.
W. Curtis Preston:So good for him.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, Prasanna, thanks for letting me rant.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you feeling better.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I'm still going to be hanging out in this office
W. Curtis Preston:for the next.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but are you at least feeling better?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I'm feeling better.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, I don't know if I, I thought I made a, I don't know if you've ever
W. Curtis Preston:been in a house where somebody had lice,
W. Curtis Preston:you've been in a house.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Did you start like psychosomatically
W. Curtis Preston:feeling lice in your hair.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So that's where I'm like, I mean, if, if I got infected, I I'm not
W. Curtis Preston:going to have symptoms yet, but still my body is like, I think is that
W. Curtis Preston:a fever said, you know, said so.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, good times.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:lots of tea.
W. Curtis Preston:Drink, lots of tea.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, not, not whiskey, although I don't know why I said whiskey.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't drink whiskey.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:This
W. Curtis Preston:I'm not a whiskey bourbon or scotch person or cigars.
W. Curtis Preston:Like my friend, Jeff.
W. Curtis Preston:See you do cigars.
W. Curtis Preston:You get COVID.
W. Curtis Preston:That's it.
W. Curtis Preston:That's that's the lesson that
W. Curtis Preston:Jeff should learn.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis and I are not medical doctors.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We are not providing any medical advice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Please go talk to your doctor or do your research.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Thank you.
W. Curtis Preston:please don't get your medical advice on
W. Curtis Preston:Backup Central's Restore it All
W. Curtis Preston:we, that is not, it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:at least.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:from the two of us.
W. Curtis Preston:at least.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:We got to have Lindsey back on and I'm just waiting for like, I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I kinda just want to bring her back on and say, is it over?
W. Curtis Preston:Can we, can we move on now?
W. Curtis Preston:That's that's the episode I want to have Lindsay back on for.
W. Curtis Preston:And if you guys don't know what I'm talking about, we did half a
W. Curtis Preston:dozen episodes in the early days of the pandemic with, uh, Dr.
W. Curtis Preston:Lindsey Schultz.
W. Curtis Preston:And she, she actually is a doctor medical doctor with a, with a, a
W. Curtis Preston:master's in public health as well.
W. Curtis Preston:And she specializes in harms reduction.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a kind of, kind of logic that you use when.
W. Curtis Preston:Wanting to say, if we're going to make this public policy.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, anyway, so yeah, I want to have her back on, but I want
W. Curtis Preston:to, I just, I want to have her on when it's like just good news.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes, we're done.
W. Curtis Preston:We can move on with our life.
W. Curtis Preston:No more.
W. Curtis Preston:COVID scares like the one I'm in right now.
W. Curtis Preston:Damn it anyway.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm going to end this thing before, before I, before I start to despair.
W. Curtis Preston:So thank you Prasanna, you know, like, like I said, for letting me rant
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Anytime Curtis, and I hope you feel better.
W. Curtis Preston:and, uh, thank you to the listeners and be sure to
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