What computers should you back up? (Backup to Basics Series)
Are you backing up all the things you should be backing up? In this latest episode of our Backup to Basics series, Mr. Backup & Prasanna look at the list of the traditional things we think about backing up: servers, databases, laptops, mobile devices, file servers, virtualization servers, etc. The big question tackled in this episode is what of these things should you be backing up? Mr. Backup, of course, takes a pretty hard line about backup, but he may surprise you on some of his exceptions. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Are you backing up all the things that you should be backing up?
Speaker:And this continuation of our backup to basic series.
Speaker:We talk about all of the traditional data sources that you should be backing up.
Speaker:Hope you enjoy it.
W. Curtis Preston:hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm your host W.
W. Curtis Preston:Curtis Preston aka a Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup.
W. Curtis Preston:And I have with me a guy whose only relationship to the Silicon Valley Bank
W. Curtis Preston:is that he used to get coffee there.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, Prasanna Malaiyandi how's it going?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Ah, I'm good, Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, I, when all the news broke about Silicon Valley Bank, I was like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:wait, that name sounds so familiar.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I bet I know where they are.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So, In one of my prior employments, uh, we were just down the street from them and in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:their headquarter location in Santa Clara.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's very interesting because in the center of it, there's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like this coffee shop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it's a standalone coffee shop and they're only open during some hours.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So some of us would walk down there, have coffee and come back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so when I heard the news about Silicon Valley Bank, I'm like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:wait, that sounds very familiar.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I went and like Google mapped it and looked it up and I was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like, wait, I've been there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I've seen the people walking around in there having coffee.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I probably had coffee with similar people, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Some of the employees are Silicon Valley Bank.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I was like, wow, that's uh,
W. Curtis Preston:maybe you had coffee with the people that
W. Curtis Preston:are now standing in line at svb.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, possibly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Now I know because, but I'm guessing though, that a lot of their stuff
Prasanna Malaiyandi:was either online or over the phone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like how often, and here's a question for you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:How often do you actually go to a physical bank?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:When was the last time you went to a bank
W. Curtis Preston:well, I don't, but all I see on the news is are
W. Curtis Preston:lines of people at svp, you know, and they're going and it's like, and it's
W. Curtis Preston:like founder after founder, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It's like the c e o and they're like, yeah, I'm trying to get my money out.
W. Curtis Preston:You
Prasanna Malaiyandi:which is a little odd in this day and age of digital,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and even the fact that these are probably like startup founders, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In tech and they're like, we're gonna go old fashioned and stand in line.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, the problem is digital doesn't work, right?
W. Curtis Preston:In the current scenario, digital doesn't work.
W. Curtis Preston:So you go up and basically your choices are a wire transfer, um,
W. Curtis Preston:cashier check, or a giant pile of cash.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I don't, I don't know if the giant pile of cash is actually,
W. Curtis Preston:can you, can you imagine that?
W. Curtis Preston:Yes, I have a $1 million bill.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't think, surely you can't walk out with a giant pile of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I bet you Well, it, I don't think you can walk out
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that same day because it depends on how much cash they have on hand.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I don't know if banks actually keep that much cash on hand.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But if you made such a large withdrawal, I'm sure if you called a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:day or two ahead, could you imagine walking out with like $10 million?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, that was kind of a problem.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, or that was the problem in the, in the first place, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Is a whole bunch of people.
W. Curtis Preston:Asking for their money when, uh, it's funny, I just got, I just got
W. Curtis Preston:a notification inside what Inside SVBs collapse that was, that's
W. Curtis Preston:the New York Times notification.
W. Curtis Preston:I just got, uh, may you live in interesting times, the
W. Curtis Preston:old, uh, Chinese, uh, proverb.
W. Curtis Preston:So in our continued, uh, backup to basic series, um, we are continuing to work.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, my current favorite book, uh, which is Modern Data Protection, my latest from
W. Curtis Preston:O'Reilly, which, um, uh, you know, it, it's my fourth book and, um, we'll see,
W. Curtis Preston:we'll see if I got a fifth one in me.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, there, there certainly is a topic floating around that's
W. Curtis Preston:been very popular lately.
W. Curtis Preston:But, uh, this chapter, what's that?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, bank collapses.
W. Curtis Preston:How not to have it run on the bank.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, it's funny, the whole banking system is really built on sort of trust
W. Curtis Preston:in that any bank can fail the way SVB did.
W. Curtis Preston:If enough people come up and say they all want their money at once, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because every bank invests for the long term and Right.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, but anyway.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't wanna talk about svb.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, by the way, we'll throw out our usual disclaimer, uh, Prasanna
W. Curtis Preston:and I work for different companies.
W. Curtis Preston:He works for Zoom, I work for Druva.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, this is not a podcast of either company and, um, The, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:the opinions that you hear are ours.
W. Curtis Preston:So the, and also, please, uh, please rate us, uh, go to your
W. Curtis Preston:favorite, uh, pod catcher.
W. Curtis Preston:Scroll down to where you can give us stars and, and tell us
W. Curtis Preston:how wonderful you think we are.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And if you wanna watch us on video, go to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Backup Central because we do post videos of all the episodes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So
W. Curtis Preston:that's right on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:if you wanna see our lovely faces,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, you can actually see what we look like.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, I wonder if the, my, if, if our viewers or listeners will have
W. Curtis Preston:the same reaction with you as my family.
W. Curtis Preston:Did you remember when they first saw what you look like?
W. Curtis Preston:They were like, he doesn't look like, because they'd heard your
W. Curtis Preston:voice so much and then, uh, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And then they saw you and they're like, oh, he didn't, he, he didn't match up to
W. Curtis Preston:what I thought he was gonna look like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:boo.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know, may, may, maybe they weren't expecting that beard.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:High expectations.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:high expectations.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but anyway, so this week we're gonna talk about, um, you know, the
W. Curtis Preston:book tries to cover all of, basically all the things you need to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:All the ways that you can back up all the why's you need to back up and, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:and all the wheres, right, so where, where you might want to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:And the hows.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and in the beginning here we're talking about the what's and uh, right
W. Curtis Preston:now the chapter is about traditional data sources, some of which we still argue over
W. Curtis Preston:whether or not they need to be backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:And I will, of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mainframes.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I will of course say that I stand firmly on
W. Curtis Preston:the ground of back up all the things, so you're not gonna hear it from me.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, there, there will be, there are some, some exceptions that
W. Curtis Preston:I discuss in this chapter.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and we'll talk about 'em.
W. Curtis Preston:But the first section, uh, is about physical servers.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What are those?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you think people actually know what physical servers are these days?
W. Curtis Preston:Well there, you know, I, you know, I, I was just on a call
W. Curtis Preston:yesterday with a Druva customer, or potential, a Druva, a prospect, and they
W. Curtis Preston:were discussing, uh, they had a number of physical servers in their data center,
W. Curtis Preston:even though they were mostly virtualized.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, do you, do you see it, I mean, do you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, I'm just wondering as everyone's talking
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about cloud and compute list, right, functions running, do people even
Prasanna Malaiyandi:know like where, like what a physical server even is anymore, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or is it sort of, and this is probably more like the people currently entering
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the workforce more than sort of people who've been in the industry for a while.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because I'm sure most people haven't physically touched
Prasanna Malaiyandi:hardware, you know, in a long time.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, it just depends on what, what generation, and by generation I
W. Curtis Preston:don't mean people, I mean, Like the generation of, of the company, right?
W. Curtis Preston:There are definitely companies like Druva where our entire, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:we, we have a lot of compute, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And we have a lot of things that we do as a company, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, with thousands of customers and, and you
W. Curtis Preston:know, thousand plus employees.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, obviously we have a need of a lot of stuff, but.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I think we have a computer, like a server, and I don't know what it does.
W. Curtis Preston:I, because I actually saw a server room at some point, but it was just
W. Curtis Preston:really small and I don't, actually, don't, I think you know what it is.
W. Curtis Preston:I think it's, um, the only thing we have is actually it's lab equipment.
W. Curtis Preston:It's, it's stuff, it's stuff pretending to be servers so that we can.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, back that stuff up, you know, and demo and stuff like that.
W. Curtis Preston:But all our, our whole infrastructure is up in the cloud somewhere.
W. Curtis Preston:And I think there's a lot of companies that are like that.
W. Curtis Preston:But for those of us that have worked at companies and continue to work
W. Curtis Preston:at companies where there's just some servers that, for one reason or another
W. Curtis Preston:they don't virtualize them, maybe they're not, um, maybe they're not.
W. Curtis Preston:Virtu liable, if I can make up a word.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:either, probably due to either hardware specs or even just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the fact that moving this to the cloud doesn't make sense for this application
Prasanna Malaiyandi:because there are too many other dependencies or it's just risk, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Every time you're migrating or moving a workload, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:There is risk involved in Sometimes it's like, Nope, we can't touch
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that, or we don't want to touch.
W. Curtis Preston:And speaking of risc, uh, I'll spell it with a c.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, if you're using the risc architecture with a c, uh, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:that's the salt, the sun architecture.
W. Curtis Preston:I still, I still call it sun.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it would be Oracle now, but you know, if you're using
W. Curtis Preston:any of the older unixes, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the IBM still is still, theirs is still going strong.
W. Curtis Preston:The, the.
W. Curtis Preston:A I X.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:That's still actively developed and released.
W. Curtis Preston:HP's kind of dead.
W. Curtis Preston:Is Solaris still developed?
W. Curtis Preston:I think it is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think it
W. Curtis Preston:I think it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well, I, well, and I just go back to the, so my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:dad, way back when he used to work at Tandem Computers, I don't know
Prasanna Malaiyandi:if you remember that name, but they used to build like nonstop kernels.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so these super high availability systems used in government agencies,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and those are still kicking around because no one wants to touch them.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No one wants to upgrade them.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So there's a variety of these, some of which are still in production.
W. Curtis Preston:Meaning, meaning production, meaning they're still being made.
W. Curtis Preston:Most of them are defunct, uh, but they're still running right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, with an uptime of.
W. Curtis Preston:1700 days or whatever the way Linux used to be.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, there, there's sort of two, there's three different types
W. Curtis Preston:of backups I talk about here.
W. Curtis Preston:The standard backup, just a file system backup, uh, and then
W. Curtis Preston:there's a bare metal backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Now you said, you said something on the pre-call, you said
W. Curtis Preston:you haven't really seen that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Not that I've seen that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I think most folks, at least a newer generation, they don't like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I've always thought, okay, when.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:So speaking personally, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:So when I had my PC in college, right, what I would do is, okay, I back up my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:data and then when it came to sort of the OS and everything else, I literally
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:would like start from scratch, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Every single time, just sort of okay, because for me, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I didn't trust like all the programs that were there or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:things that might have changed.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:So I'm like, I'll just start from a clean slate and I had it down to a science.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Like I would literally reinstall my entire system like once every three months.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Was that a, was that a window system?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, that's, I, I didn't do it every three months, but
W. Curtis Preston:when I had Windows, I, I did that a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:I did the whole sort of refresh thing.
W. Curtis Preston:But when, when you're looking at a more complicated architecture, uh, there
W. Curtis Preston:are a lot of reasons to, uh, basically back up the operating system itself.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:And when you're doing that, you're not just backing up.
W. Curtis Preston:All the files in the operating system, you're potentially backing up.
W. Curtis Preston:Basically the, the blocks that make up the, you know, the boot block
W. Curtis Preston:and all of that kind of stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, there, there's a couple of different ways to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:And the idea is that if the hardware itself died, right, um, or you bought
W. Curtis Preston:new hardware, if you, if you just bought new hardware, as long as the, the OS was.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, plug and play from a, from a new hardware perspective.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You could just literally restore the old s the old os to the new hardware.
W. Curtis Preston:And it would just, it would just run right.
W. Curtis Preston:And honestly, it, it worked pretty well.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, and there are, there continued to be backup
W. Curtis Preston:software products that still.
W. Curtis Preston:In that way.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, the thing is that it's gone by the wayside because of virtualization.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The one question I wanted to ask though is I don't think
Prasanna Malaiyandi:people understand, just going back to one comment, you made the complexities right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Can you sort of walk through, and I know sometimes we talk about like bare metal
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backups and then I know we'll eventually talk about restores, but it's really
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the restore I'm interested in, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Without bare metal backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like how complex does restore get and like what are the benefits of doing a bare
Prasanna Malaiyandi:metal backup from a restore or recovery
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, again, outside of the virtualization world, you basically have two choices.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, you have three choices.
W. Curtis Preston:You have the one that you described, which really doesn't
W. Curtis Preston:work in the data center, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You, you, you have to, you have to like reload the os, reload all the
W. Curtis Preston:applications, and then do all the configuration that you may have done to.
W. Curtis Preston:D o s and all the applications.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you could potentially restore a bunch of files if you were really good at it and
W. Curtis Preston:knew exactly what you needed to restore to put all that configuration back in place.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the second, and probably more common was the idea of maintaining an image.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, you're gonna maintain a Solaris image and an a I X image
W. Curtis Preston:and a, you know, a Linux image.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you just, you lay down that image and that image isn't just the
W. Curtis Preston:os, it's the OS configured the way you want it configured in your environment.
W. Curtis Preston:So you would lay down that image and then you do a handful of
W. Curtis Preston:customizations, like host name.
W. Curtis Preston:That kind of stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and then it'd be off and running.
W. Curtis Preston:And then the third would be you literally back up all of the bites and
W. Curtis Preston:blocks, uh, that, you know, comprise
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a specific machine.
W. Curtis Preston:for each specific machine.
W. Curtis Preston:And then what you need is you need to boot a mini root.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, basically you, you know, you need to, cuz you need to restore to a
W. Curtis Preston:drive that you're not currently using.
W. Curtis Preston:So you boot a mini root.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, basically, you know, sometimes different oss work differently,
W. Curtis Preston:but like with Windows you could restore really basic.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, mini root, and then you'd boot into that, and then you'd
W. Curtis Preston:do the restore of the drive.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it gets really complicated.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, but the idea is that, um, and, and it's one of the reasons why I
W. Curtis Preston:think that it, it went by the wayside and the fact that virtualization came
W. Curtis Preston:out, but, um, it's really complicated.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't think I wanna do that ever.
W. Curtis Preston:No.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, well, um, but you know what, uh, time machine is a bare metal backup,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because it puts back everything.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, it puts back the whole thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the other thing I had under physical service B was backing up,
W. Curtis Preston:NAS, there was a time, uh, shoutout to Steven Manley Druva's CTO.
W. Curtis Preston:There was a time when I was a big fan of N D P, the network.
W. Curtis Preston:Network data management protocol, which was the only way, cuz I didn't
W. Curtis Preston:like backing up NAS servers via NFS and S and B, because you're competing
W. Curtis Preston:for the U, you're competing with the users for the resources of the machine.
W. Curtis Preston:And then within DMP it could deprioritize the backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, under the priority of the users.
W. Curtis Preston:But, you know, without going into it too much, there, there were, there are a lot
W. Curtis Preston:of problems with N DM p, the, the chief of them being that it's platform dependent,
W. Curtis Preston:meaning that if you back up a NetApp, that backup only works on a NetApp.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For some vendors, I would say for some backup
Prasanna Malaiyandi:vendors, not all have that limitation.
W. Curtis Preston:I think I'm gonna have to argue with you because the
W. Curtis Preston:format comes from the platform.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So if, if I recall, yes, it does come from the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:platform, but there are some products which can reverse engineer and actually
Prasanna Malaiyandi:write out to a different target.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:So there are some backup products that that basically extrapolate some
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Very few.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But it can't export out and restore everything back perfectly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:because like you said, if one vendor supports some attributes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:cuz each vendor is unique, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Another vendor, you may not be able to get that same access.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So it will try, it'll at least get you back your data, but it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:not guaranteed all the metadata associated with it matches or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:apples and other things like that.
W. Curtis Preston:So what most people do is they, they mount the
W. Curtis Preston:NAS device, uh, to some kind of proxy and they back it up that way.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, and.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, and honestly, especially if you've gone to an incremental
W. Curtis Preston:forever approach, uh, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
W. Curtis Preston:Back in the day when we were doing a, a mixture of full and
W. Curtis Preston:incrementals, maybe you're having a bigger impact on the filer.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, um, all right.
W. Curtis Preston:The next we have is virtual servers.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, so the world of virtualization, the likes of.
W. Curtis Preston:Hyper V, uh, a H v, kvm, all of these things.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, I'm gonna wax, uh, historical here.
W. Curtis Preston:Back in the day, the only thing we could do was VM level backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Basically, you put an agent in the vm, you backed up the vm just like it was a
W. Curtis Preston:virtual machine, and it was a horrible, if any of you're still out there doing
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sorry, can you restate that?
W. Curtis Preston:what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You said you put an agent in the VM and you back up
W. Curtis Preston:VM as if it were a physical machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I thought you said virtual machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:My bad.
W. Curtis Preston:No.
W. Curtis Preston:As if it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I,
W. Curtis Preston:a physical machine.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, maybe at least that's what I thought I said anyway,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:so, um, and, and if you're still doing fulls
W. Curtis Preston:and incrementals in VMs, stop.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just, I don't know why anyone would st It was horrible
W. Curtis Preston:from a architecture standpoint.
W. Curtis Preston:It beat the crap out of the virtualization box.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:did you, did you deal with that anywhere where you worked?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So one of my former employers, uh, was very big on VMware
W. Curtis Preston:Mm-hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so, um, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Luckily, they were smart enough to not do that, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:To do sort of throw an agent into a VM and back it up like a physical server.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so at least when I joined, I wasn't there as part of the initial wave towards
Prasanna Malaiyandi:figuring out how to back up VMware.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:By the time I was there, they were already doing smarter things, which you'll talk
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about in a second for backing up VMs because yeah, whenever I thought about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it, I'm like, why would you ever back it up like a normal physical server?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That makes no
W. Curtis Preston:because back then we had, we, well, we had no choice, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, virtualization broke back up overnight, uh, and we
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you like to talk about that's like, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the, you know, we had to do things like spread the fulls out across the
W. Curtis Preston:month, spread the, in the cumulative incrementals out across the week, and
W. Curtis Preston:then do a nightly incremental, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:because just going back to the, what you were
Prasanna Malaiyandi:talking about of sort of like the NAS and the N D M P case, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:With VMware it's a lot worse because if you're backing up one vm, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:could potentially impact all of the other virtual machines running
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on that same ESX host, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:If you, if you don't spread the load out, because the full backup is quite, is
W. Curtis Preston:quite a, a, a knock on a, on a vm, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So if you're, if you're doing a bunch of full backups at the same time on
W. Curtis Preston:the same physical server, you're, you know, it's not gonna be good.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It's gonna be a little traffic jam.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and then, um, we started getting this, like, this idea of specialized
W. Curtis Preston:backups for hypervisors, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So that you could back up at the hypervisor level, right at the VMware
W. Curtis Preston:level, at the, you know, hyper V level and you could back up the, the VMs as files.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, there is one crucial.
W. Curtis Preston:Piece of technology that is required for that to work with Windows.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you know what that techno piece of technology would be?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:VSS.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Vss.
W. Curtis Preston:So that is Windows Volume Shadow Services.
W. Curtis Preston:You want to talk about that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, so think of it like Microsoft's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:snapshotting technology, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Which it pretty much is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's just not the normal way that you would think about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:designing snapshots, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, in how once you take a snapshot, Data sort of gets split differently and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:merging 'em back together is a little odd.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's not like what you would think when you think about like hardware snapshots.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so there are a lot of implications with using vss snapshots.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I would say the one that I commonly ran across was when they designed the VSS
Prasanna Malaiyandi:protocol, you basically had to complete a snapshot within a certain amount of.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:depending on the system, right, because depending
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on also like how many layers, if it was a software snapshot or a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:hardware based snapshot, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It could take more than that amount of time, which means that your snapshots
Prasanna Malaiyandi:start failing and as backup, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You want to take a snapshot first, so you have a stable point in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:time before you do your backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You now started to get backup failures, which were painful.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, they were, uh, but basically what, what it allowed us to do in
W. Curtis Preston:the, in the, the thing about vss is that it could be, it, it had APIs
W. Curtis Preston:so that you could call those APIs.
W. Curtis Preston:And so VMware and Hyper B and these other virtualization products, they
W. Curtis Preston:could call that API and say, Hey, make a snapshot, and then we're
W. Curtis Preston:gonna back up that snapshot, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So you can back up the, the VM externally.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, uh, while still getting a stable, consistent image, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:that was the whole point of v s s.
W. Curtis Preston:Is coffee gonna be okay?
W. Curtis Preston:I'm very concerned for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay, come here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay, come.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Come
W. Curtis Preston:There you go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:now.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:He's fine.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I could hear him down there.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, poor, please get poor coffee.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, he sounded so sad.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but yeah, that, so that's basically, you know, if you're
W. Curtis Preston:backing up virtualization, you know, or or virtualized servers,
W. Curtis Preston:you need to back them up in the way.
W. Curtis Preston:That platform likes.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and you need, you still, I think you need to be doing incremental,
W. Curtis Preston:forever approaches, deduplication approaches so that you minimize the
W. Curtis Preston:impact on the physical server that's hosting all that, uh, all those VMs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I have a question for
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, sure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Was V s s the first time you've heard of a vendor
Prasanna Malaiyandi:enabling backups to be better?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know we talked about N D M P, but from like a operating system
Prasanna Malaiyandi:software side of the house.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, certainly.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, well, no, cuz I've been around a while.
W. Curtis Preston:The,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, that's why I was asking.
W. Curtis Preston:the oddly the, the one that actually jumps out at me.
W. Curtis Preston:Was, makes this B from a i X.
W. Curtis Preston:What makes this B was we'd go back to bare metal backup makes
W. Curtis Preston:B was time machine for ax, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So it was a, a complete backup of the operating system and everything on it.
W. Curtis Preston:To a tape, which if you had the tape driving the tape and you had
W. Curtis Preston:a completely brand new server you could restore, that makes the speed
W. Curtis Preston:directly to the OS and restore it.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I, I can think of that.
W. Curtis Preston:I can think of that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but this was the one, this was one that was, This was useful for
W. Curtis Preston:a lot of other purposes, right.
W. Curtis Preston:For orchestration.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and it also works with applications because not only does
W. Curtis Preston:it take a snapshot of the operating system, it takes a snapshot of any
W. Curtis Preston:VSS compliant, uh, applications.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:See, obviously all of the Microsoft apps, but Oracle as VSS compliant
W. Curtis Preston:as well, uh, and other, uh, databases that might run on Windows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:which is what you want because you want those
Prasanna Malaiyandi:applications to be consistent when you
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Otherwise, you're backing up a file that's changing as you're
W. Curtis Preston:backing it up and that's no good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:So the next we have is desktops and laptops.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and this is, this is what I was referring to earlier when I was saying
W. Curtis Preston:that we're gonna argue over whether or not you and I, but you know, whether
W. Curtis Preston:or not these need to be backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I, I come down strongly on the back up, all the things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, what do you, what, what have you run into?
W. Curtis Preston:People talking about backing up their laptops out there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, I have, I think, What you end up seeing is a lot of people
Prasanna Malaiyandi:are like, why would I need to back it up?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Especially when you're using all these SaaS services like Microsoft
Prasanna Malaiyandi:365 Google Workspaces, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:How much, and I get the point because it's like how much data actually
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sits on your laptop these days?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:However, there are scenarios like you're offline for some reason.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like right now in California, we just got hit with an atmospheric river.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:There's a bunch of power outage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In the area, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Which means no internet connectivity.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you have to work or if you're doing offline editing, that's great, but that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:data's sitting on your laptop, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so if that's important, you need to make sure you back it up, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:One of the things, you go back to Curtis, it's like, if it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:important to you, back it up.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:The.
W. Curtis Preston:The funny thing is that, um, well, yeah, so that's really what comes down to is
W. Curtis Preston:do you ever create data on your laptop that only sits on your laptop, or, and
W. Curtis Preston:by the way, um, the next thing we're gonna talk about is mobile devices.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, And if you do so I do.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:I make this podcast, um, and, uh, and I write.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, I, um, there is, although, and I write by voice, uh, you know, dictation.
W. Curtis Preston:So for a brief period of time, all of the words of a particular chapter are.
W. Curtis Preston:On, not just my laptop.
W. Curtis Preston:It's funny, my laptop here, over to my right here is my Windows laptop that
W. Curtis Preston:I use just for voice dictation because Dragon, uh, for some reason decided to
W. Curtis Preston:give up the, uh, the Macintosh market.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I've never, I haven't said the full word Macintosh at all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Macin
W. Curtis Preston:I dunno why I said that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, um, yeah, so for, for a brief period of time, Any
W. Curtis Preston:given chapter is sitting only on that device, and it would suck.
W. Curtis Preston:If I lost that chapter right, um, there are people who create, and, and I,
W. Curtis Preston:and when I'm producing these podcasts right as I'm producing the podcast,
W. Curtis Preston:various pieces of that podcast exist only on this laptop I don't use.
W. Curtis Preston:So interestingly enough, interestingly enough, I now use.
W. Curtis Preston:A sassy, it's not fully sass, but it is a sa now that I'm thinking about it, the
W. Curtis Preston:script, which is the tool that I used to edit my podcast, which I love, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I really do.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but the way it works is that as soon as you load files, as soon as you load
W. Curtis Preston:the source files into script, they're immediately uploaded to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:on a local copy.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but it, but it's, it's immediately synchronizing, uh, the, the both
W. Curtis Preston:the source files as well as all of your edits to the cloud so that,
W. Curtis Preston:um, uh, and then it's, um, and it's maintaining a cache of that locally.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so it's, it's kind of sassy.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but the
W. Curtis Preston:like if you have, if you have a product like that,
W. Curtis Preston:then maybe, maybe you don't have to.
W. Curtis Preston:If that's the only thing you have, you might not have to back up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:but the question is, do they back up the stuff on their side?
W. Curtis Preston:That is a really good question, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:questions about SaaS.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, yeah, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, um, Which is why I do what I do, which is like I have a local copy of all
W. Curtis Preston:of the pieces that go into the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I don't have, because I don't have a copy of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you also have the raw too,
W. Curtis Preston:I have the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you also have the raw stuffers.
W. Curtis Preston:have the raw stuff.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a long time to recover if you had to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I would have to kind of re-edit
W. Curtis Preston:an episode if I had to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, um, well, it, so first off, a number of things
W. Curtis Preston:would have to happen, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So the, the, the SaaS service would have to go down
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Your laptop
W. Curtis Preston:I would need to edit a past.
W. Curtis Preston:Which I almost have never done, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If I do, it happens within a day or two.
W. Curtis Preston:It happened this week, oddly enough, uh, because I was editing, I was editing
W. Curtis Preston:late at night and I messed up the intro.
W. Curtis Preston:For those of you that are listeners, you heard a weird intro.
W. Curtis Preston:You're, the music didn't match.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a weird, uh, I figured that out as I was listening to it later
W. Curtis Preston:and I was like, oh, I gotta fix it.
W. Curtis Preston:So I had to go back and re-edit the, the podcast, but that
W. Curtis Preston:was five minutes worth of.
W. Curtis Preston:Monday
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Because I was already there.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, and then I fixed it.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, but I'm not going back and editing a podcast from two months ago.
W. Curtis Preston:But anyway, this is, this is definitely an edge case, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, and I know you're talking about podcasts, but the other
Prasanna Malaiyandi:thing, like I think a lot of people have is like they're pictures.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like I have, I take pictures where I used to take pictures, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I don't use any SaaS service for editing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't use Lightroom in the cloud or iCloud photos or whatever else, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I do everything on my laptop, and so those pictures I never wanna lose.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I back that stuff up four times.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm a little crazy, but I have four copies sitting in various places.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, uh, uh, we'll get to mobile devices next.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, let me, but let me give, let me give a scenario of one of where I said
W. Curtis Preston:in the book where I said, okay, I'm gonna concede the point on this one.
W. Curtis Preston:And that is, um, Chromebooks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Chromebooks are nothing more than a cache for what's in Google.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so there's nothing that should ever be on the Chromebook
W. Curtis Preston:other than just the late most recent synchronized changes, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I, I, you know, you can use it offline and then synchronized changes,
W. Curtis Preston:but honestly, if you were offline, you wouldn't be able to back it up anyway.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I would say that listeners should wait till we get to the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:chapter on SaaS services, where we talk about what you need to do on that site.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, definitely,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So it's not that you, it eliminates the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:need to worry about backups.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's just you don't need to back up your desktop.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and then we talk about mobile devices.
W. Curtis Preston:This one, uh, you know, and I'm, I'm gonna say that I.
W. Curtis Preston:I am not compliant, uh, in this regard because I am trusting iCloud photos,
W. Curtis Preston:and this is one of those things where I really have to look into this
W. Curtis Preston:and I need to see if there we can come up with a solution for this.
W. Curtis Preston:Because the beauty of the way the iPhone works and the way iCloud photos is that
W. Curtis Preston:iCloud maintains the high res copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:master.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, and then on my phone is like the low res copy,
W. Curtis Preston:and I only get the high res copy if I like actually start using a photo.
W. Curtis Preston:I get it automatically, but there's no way that I can find yet, um, to,
W. Curtis Preston:to get all of those high res photos out easily and store them someplace.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Can.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Interesting.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, but, but this, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna
W. Curtis Preston:submit this as a, as a thing where I'm not doing the right thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I am trusting Apple far too much now.
W. Curtis Preston:I am paying for them.
W. Curtis Preston:I am paying for them to store this data.
W. Curtis Preston:So, you know, but the data, the photos that matter to me are only in one place.
W. Curtis Preston:So
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Bad Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Bad.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
W. Curtis Preston:The high res versions of these photos are only, and videos are only in one place.
W. Curtis Preston:Mainly it would be the really cool videos of my granddaughter,
W. Curtis Preston:Lily, that I would miss.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But still, you should figure out how to at least pull that data down
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to a laptop, so then you can then
W. Curtis Preston:I, I've, I've looked into it.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I've looked into it and I, I don't wanna spend too much time
W. Curtis Preston:talking about here, but I've looked into it before and, and, and I think
W. Curtis Preston:then I got busy with other things.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, uh, And, and I really do need to come up with it, with a solution, and
W. Curtis Preston:I need to bring, um, need to bring our friend, uh, Daniel on, uh, for that one.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, but the, the, the point that I want to make is that iCloud photos being
W. Curtis Preston:an exception here, if your device that you're holding is, is basically one of
W. Curtis Preston:two copies, um, You know, you that, that basically the cloud maintains a backup
W. Curtis Preston:copy of your phone and you maintain a copy of your phone and the, and the
W. Curtis Preston:cloud has the ability to, here's a big, here's a big if, if the cloud I, if you
W. Curtis Preston:go into your phone and you basically delete all your photos, is there any
W. Curtis Preston:way to get those back on the cloud?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, cuz that's mainly what we're talking about, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It's photos.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, in your email, you're basically, you're just a cash of the, um, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think messages work the same way as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Lisa, if you're using iMessage.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, and the other, yeah, the other thing, well, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, It, it, it gets, it gets more complicated when we start talking
W. Curtis Preston:about consumer personal devices.
W. Curtis Preston:If, if you're, if you're a, a, uh, a commercial user, you can,
W. Curtis Preston:there, there are services, Druva backs up, uh, mobile devices.
W. Curtis Preston:It backs up the iPhone, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but we can only back up, and by we, I mean any vendors that do this, we can only
W. Curtis Preston:back up what the OS vendor allows us to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, which on the iPhone means pretty much only Apple
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a whole lot.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, like, um, like if there was a des on the iPhone, is
W. Curtis Preston:there a script on the iPhone?
W. Curtis Preston:I dunno if there was a script on the iPhone, like I couldn't back
W. Curtis Preston:up its data because that's just the way, it's a security feature.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And even WhatsApp is the same, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You have to use WhatsApp's Cloud backup where it'll sync the data to some data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:source you get, you tell it to, but you can't use it through a centralized place
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to backup everything on your iPhone.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Although, I do wonder what happens when you do a physical
Prasanna Malaiyandi:backup using a lightning cable in iTunes?
W. Curtis Preston:Are you talking Are, are you back to photos?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, no, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just in general.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I can load iTunes, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I could say backup my phone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think it does capture all that data though, so
W. Curtis Preston:does.
W. Curtis Preston:It doesn't solve my photo problem though,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, it doesn't solve well.
W. Curtis Preston:because my phone doesn't have the, the high res copies.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:I wi here's what I wish, I wish there was a cloud service
W. Curtis Preston:that I could pay that would be able to export my high res photos out of, uh, I.
W. Curtis Preston:And just back it up.
W. Curtis Preston:I pay for that service, but they don't make it available.
W. Curtis Preston:They don't make those, um, the high res copies.
W. Curtis Preston:I think I can sync them to my laptop, but then I need, I need a lot of storage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:I have, I have no idea how many terabytes
W. Curtis Preston:of photos I have up in iCloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I know for a fact that I would need a separate drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:but, but basically, so regarding mobile
W. Curtis Preston:devices, my opinion is the same.
W. Curtis Preston:If you're creating data on these devices that is important to you, and it's only
W. Curtis Preston:on that device or only in the cloud, uh, you should back up that data.
W. Curtis Preston:And yes, I, I know, I know I need to listen to my own, my own
W. Curtis Preston:advice regarding the, the photos.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, But if this is corporate data, uh, you get, you get no, you get no grace.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I can think of, I worked with an engineering company in St.
W. Curtis Preston:Louis, um, and, uh, they, they basically, they would send
W. Curtis Preston:people out into the field with.
W. Curtis Preston:iPads and they would take pictures of jobs.
W. Curtis Preston:Those, you know, those were photos that needed to be backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:Those were corporate data that existed only in those tablets
W. Curtis Preston:and only in those accounts.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so you would have to, anyway, I, I don't want to, I don't want to, but
W. Curtis Preston:my point is, if it's data that's being created and is, it exists only in
W. Curtis Preston:one place, it needs to be backed up.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it's important to you?
W. Curtis Preston:And it's important to you, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If it's data that doesn't matter.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I just dunno what that data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Don't back it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Is there data that doesn't matter?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, I was thinking.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like if you didn't care about like random pictures you're taking or if
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you're taking, say, a picture of a document just for convenience sake,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to someone.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:If you're only using it to send the, you know, you take the picture and then you
W. Curtis Preston:send it to the other person and they're the recipient of the picture, then
W. Curtis Preston:that document doesn't matter anymore.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, there is this concept, by the way that I mentioned in here of
W. Curtis Preston:mobile device management, which you really should think about.
W. Curtis Preston:So if you're, so it's very common as I do, it's very common to use your.
W. Curtis Preston:Cell phone at work.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:It's very common for companies not to buy, uh, mobile phones anymore.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:But if, um, if you are concerned about the security implications of that, that's what
W. Curtis Preston:mobile device management is for, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You c
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it's corporate data, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You wanna make sure that if something happens to the phone, like it's
Prasanna Malaiyandi:lost or whatever else, you could protect your corporate data and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:remote wipe the device, et cetera.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and it also, it also creates like a, like almost, I don't know, it's like
W. Curtis Preston:a virtu, it's like a vpc, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, inside the phone, A sandbox.
W. Curtis Preston:That's a better, that's a better term.
W. Curtis Preston:Creates a sandbox in the phone where you can put corporate apps.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, yeah, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and you can make your own rules.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, Back up, all the things.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I'm gonna pull, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the last page in the chapter
W. Curtis Preston:cuz I've, I've got final thoughts in the chapter and I wonder what I said.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think it is really, and here's the thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know we talked about if it's important, back it up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think the flip side is if you don't know what data is important
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or not, back up everything.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly
Prasanna Malaiyandi:safe than sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:What I, what I did mention here is that some companies are adopting
W. Curtis Preston:a sync and share tool as their backup method for their laptops.
W. Curtis Preston:And I did mention in the, in the, um, in the chapter that,
W. Curtis Preston:that that was a bad idea.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, if it's corporate data and I can, basically, the problem with
W. Curtis Preston:sync and share is if I delete it on my laptop, I delete it in the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, if, if you've got a solution for that particular problem, a good
W. Curtis Preston:solution to be able to restore that customer's account, that user's
W. Curtis Preston:account, and my laptop, back to the way it looked before something happened.
W. Curtis Preston:Because now what we're talking about is things like ransomware, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Sync and share is a great way to put ransomware in the cloud, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, encrypt all those stuff on your, on your desktop and then
W. Curtis Preston:your encrypt, and then it's just gonna synchronize it up, up to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Now, here's a question.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I know we'll probably talk about it in the SaaS chapter, but for that sync and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:share solution, if they were taking copies of those, the data that existed in the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:cloud backups of the data that existed in the cloud, would that change your mind?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, if you could, yeah, I, I think in general.
W. Curtis Preston:In general, yes.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:But in general, what I'm finding is that's not the point.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, yeah, exactly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No one's really doing
W. Curtis Preston:they're saying, they're saying, well, we're
W. Curtis Preston:trying to save money, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And so we're not gonna back up laptops.
W. Curtis Preston:We're just gonna use OneDrive.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, you're backing up OneDrive, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, no, because it's Microsoft and it's a SaaS service.
W. Curtis Preston:You're wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:You're just plain wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Just Google the Microsoft.
W. Curtis Preston:Shared responsibility model.
W. Curtis Preston:Read the page, the information and data, your responsibility, not theirs.
W. Curtis Preston:It's plain as day on their website.
W. Curtis Preston:So stop telling me that you don't need to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, OneDrive.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but um, yeah, so, so yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, so to go back to your question though, if you're backing up, Um, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, the cloud that you're syncing to, to something else, then, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:maybe I would withdraw my objection.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, well, I, I withdraw my objection.
W. Curtis Preston:I just, it's maybe I might have a different objection.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:but, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's just how it's being implemented would be the question.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, would we get all the data?
W. Curtis Preston:Obviously there's a potential of data loss there depending on how well the
W. Curtis Preston:synchronization is happening because here's my problem with OneDrive,
W. Curtis Preston:specifically OneDrive, is that there are no global controls over how
W. Curtis Preston:synchronization works or if it works.
W. Curtis Preston:So there's no, there's no console that says all of my users are sync.
W. Curtis Preston:That's, to me as a, as a practitioner, that's terrifying.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And so this goes back to your question.
W. Curtis Preston:So it, you're still relying on the synchronization process of OneDrive,
W. Curtis Preston:which for the record can be de can be deactivated by any user at any time.
W. Curtis Preston:And not only can it be deactivated, and I've heard that you can deactivate
W. Curtis Preston:that ability, if I've heard you can turn on off that ability.
W. Curtis Preston:They just have to like, not connect to the internet.
W. Curtis Preston:They could connect to the internet for a long time or not connect to 365, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Or whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, the, the fact that there's no global view for me to see that everybody
W. Curtis Preston:is syncing and then for me to notice, oh, Prasanna hasn't synced in a week.
W. Curtis Preston:What's, what's, what's going on?
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna?
W. Curtis Preston:And you're like, oh, well my network card died.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, well perhaps we should get you a new network
Prasanna Malaiyandi:fix that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, my, my home internet went out because I live in
W. Curtis Preston:the Bay Area and we've been having background, little, little, little bit
W. Curtis Preston:of a rain up there and down here as well.
W. Curtis Preston:It was raining quite a bit this morning.
W. Curtis Preston:How's the weather right
Prasanna Malaiyandi:more than the rain was, it's nice and sunny.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or it was sunny.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Now it's overcast, but no rain until next week.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But yeah, I think it was a 50 mile per hour gusts yesterday
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that sort of did a lot of things or brought a lot of things down.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So,
W. Curtis Preston:Speaking of the 50 mile per hour gust, uh, I believe that you
W. Curtis Preston:solved our blueberry, uh, mystery as well.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, remember I was saying that I had these blueberry
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:over my, all over both cars and all over the driveway.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, we looked, and they're not actual blueberries, but they're blueberries.
W. Curtis Preston:They're not blueberries.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but yeah, the neighbor, the neighbor house over has a tree.
W. Curtis Preston:With little blueberries in it.
W. Curtis Preston:And so it must have been the gusts, all the gusts that we had, they must have
W. Curtis Preston:just been blown over and we just were the unfortunate recipients of all of those.
W. Curtis Preston:They just went everywhere.
W. Curtis Preston:And it was like, what?
W. Curtis Preston:At first we thought they were birds, right?
W. Curtis Preston:But it was like, man did an entire flock of birds at eight
W. Curtis Preston:berries just fly over our house.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:All right, well thanks, uh, thanks again, Prasanna for chatting
W. Curtis Preston:about our favorite subject.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Thank you for educating me on or enlighten
Prasanna Malaiyandi:me on bare metal restores.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:See, I learn something
W. Curtis Preston:back in the day, um, yeah, we used to do, I used
W. Curtis Preston:to do, do you remember ZIP drives?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, so I used to do a bare metal backup of my Linux laptop,
W. Curtis Preston:and we could do it with windows too, uh, of, of the, of an Intel based laptop.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, with zip drive, basically you would, you would boot, you would boot.
W. Curtis Preston:You needed a floppy, you needed a floppy, you would boot, you had a mini route
W. Curtis Preston:that was on the floppy, like Tom's, Archie, bt, you remember that one.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you would boot, you would put that on the floppy.
W. Curtis Preston:You'd boot to.
W. Curtis Preston:The zip drive would have, you could read the zip drive, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:and you would actually use dd.
W. Curtis Preston:You would use DD to, to, which
Prasanna Malaiyandi:bring the data
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know what Didi stood for.
W. Curtis Preston:Direct disk.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it was a Unix command and you could do it.
W. Curtis Preston:Basically it was a block to block copy of the drive and you
W. Curtis Preston:created a file on the zip drive.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's how I used to do Bemo on my laptops back in
W. Curtis Preston:the day, uh, back in the day.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, hey, thanks to the listeners for sticking with us this far, and remember to
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