What is archive and retrieve? (Backup to Basics)
Archive is NOT backup, and hopefully this episode will help you understand how/why that is the case. In this continued romp through W. Curtis Preston's Modern Data Protection, we explore the definition of archive, and how different it is from backup. You should have no trouble understanding the difference between the two after listening to this episode. As usual, Mr. Backup fills in the definition with interesting stories of what happens when you confuse backup and archive. Enjoy!
Mentioned in this episode:
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hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore It All podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm a host w Curtis Preston, aka Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup, and I have with me my pedantry prognosticator Prasanna Malaiyandi
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So wait, what am I?
W. Curtis Preston:Pedantry.
W. Curtis Preston:It.
W. Curtis Preston:It's like, uh, it's like pedantic.
W. Curtis Preston:It's like pedantry.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, pedantry.
W. Curtis Preston:Is it Pedantry?
W. Curtis Preston:Pedant.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I
W. Curtis Preston:it's, yeah, it's pedantry.
W. Curtis Preston:No, it's pedantry.
W. Curtis Preston:Pedantry Prognosticator Prasanna Malaiyandi
Prasanna Malaiyandi:how many more PS can he throw in there?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What's going on, Curtis?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You doing okay?
W. Curtis Preston:cause we're doing, we're doing, we're doing, we're
W. Curtis Preston:doing some, some pedantry today.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, we are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:very specific.
W. Curtis Preston:very specific.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, pedantry is defined as the excessive concern with minor details and rules.
W. Curtis Preston:And we're arguing over two words that many people consider to be synonyms.
W. Curtis Preston:And we're going, no, they're not.
W. Curtis Preston:They are not the same.
W. Curtis Preston:Last week we talked about backup.
W. Curtis Preston:This week we're gonna talk about archive.
W. Curtis Preston:This is of course, a continuation of our backup to basic series,
W. Curtis Preston:which is, um, referring to my book, modern Data Protection.
W. Curtis Preston:Little picture of there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, uh, which you can get for free at ebook version by going to druva.com/ebook.
W. Curtis Preston:It is my latest O'Reilly book, although I'm thinking about writing a new one.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, uh, we'll see, we'll see if I actually pull it off, but, uh, this
W. Curtis Preston:last one took 10 years . So , we'll
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, well, well, let's be honest though,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis, it took you 10 years from the first time you thought about it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to when it got published, but from when you actually started writing.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it was about what, like three months
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It was three months for you to write the book.
W. Curtis Preston:It was all in the treadmill.
W. Curtis Preston:Remember?
W. Curtis Preston:It was, uh, it was a, it was a, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of the pandemic.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, pandemic project.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, uh, it was a Preston Pandemic project.
W. Curtis Preston:Speaking of , the piece, but it, um, I did it on the treadmill, used a dragon,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, professional, a big fan of that.
W. Curtis Preston:I've used it for many, many years.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, and then immediately put it into Google Docs and then let you look at it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:You are one of my many technical
Prasanna Malaiyandi:reviewers.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Technical reviewers.
W. Curtis Preston:What were you gonna say?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, I was gonna say that there were quite a few people reviewing, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Your work, but.
W. Curtis Preston:some, some people did just like one chapter, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I had other people, I did other people that work for competitors.
W. Curtis Preston:And by the way, I'll, you know, since I'm talking about that, I'll mention that.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I work for Druva, uh, Prasanna works for Zoom.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, this is not a podcast of either company.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the opinions that you hear are ours.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, you know, but because I work for Druva, obviously a competitor in
W. Curtis Preston:the space or a vendor in the space, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, I was trying really hard not to weight the book on Druva's behalf.
W. Curtis Preston:So I had some people that work for, uh, a couple of the vendors,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, competitors that we run into.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, Uh, do a technical review.
W. Curtis Preston:But, uh, also, uh, please rate us at, uh, by, go to your favorite, uh, podcast
W. Curtis Preston:or scroll down to the stars and give us all the stars and comments and whatnot.
W. Curtis Preston:And if you wanna join a conversation, just reach out to me, w Curtis
W. Curtis Preston:Preston gmail, or at WC preston on Twitter and we'll make it happen.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so we're gonna talk about archive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Actually before you, before we get to that, I think for
Prasanna Malaiyandi:people who may not want to come on the podcast because they're unsure or don't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:wanna spend the time, I think it's also.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's important that they could reach out to either of us on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Twitter and start a conversation.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You don't have to come on the podcast, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We wanna engage with our listeners.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you have questions, if you want us to talk about a topic right, that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you're interested in, let us know.
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:Absolutely.
W. Curtis Preston:If you just wanna write me an email and say, Prasanna sucks, um, that is fine.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Uh, sure,
W. Curtis Preston:no one would ever do that.
W. Curtis Preston:You're too nice.
W. Curtis Preston:Everybody likes you.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so , right?
W. Curtis Preston:So last, the last week's episode, we talked about the definition of backup,
W. Curtis Preston:and that's really, really important.
W. Curtis Preston:One of the reasons why it was really, really important is
W. Curtis Preston:because it's not an archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Archive is something very closely related to backup and people talk
W. Curtis Preston:a lot about it, and archive is actually something a little bit.
W. Curtis Preston:Harder to define.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, and, and also because again, uh, it's used, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:as a, as we mentioned, it's used a lot in popular culture, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I think about, when I think about the, the pop culture understanding of the word
W. Curtis Preston:archive, I think about the final scene in the original Raiders of the Lost Arc.
W. Curtis Preston:Do, do you remember the final scene.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is this the one where they are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:in the
W. Curtis Preston:They, killed all the Nazis.
W. Curtis Preston:Remember they killed all the Nazis.
W. Curtis Preston:And then they, and so they got the, they got the arc, right?
W. Curtis Preston:They got the arc at a covenant.
W. Curtis Preston:then what?
W. Curtis Preston:You remember the very final scene?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't remember the very final scene.
W. Curtis Preston:They're like, well, somebody doing something with this ark.
W. Curtis Preston:And they're, oh yeah, yeah, we got, we got our best people on it.
W. Curtis Preston:And they show them hammering it shut into a wooden, um, Crate and
W. Curtis Preston:then putting that crate into this gigantic warehouse with thousands of
W. Curtis Preston:other crates that look just like it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I also think about like cold case.
W. Curtis Preston:I dunno if you've ever watched Cold Case, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Where they're just combing through the archives, they're combing through these
W. Curtis Preston:old cases and they're just boxes of stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:But by the way, we're, we're gonna come back to that cold case thing
W. Curtis Preston:because I think it's actually the way they archive cases is actually.
W. Curtis Preston:Pretty close to what I think of as one of the types of archives.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and people think, and people therefore think of any old data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:as an archive.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they use the phrase, which, you know, makes my spine tingle.
W. Curtis Preston:They used the phrase, I'm gonna archive a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that is not a phrase.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, You know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You know what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We should print stickers and if you want a sticker, let us know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:archive is not backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Archive is not bag up and you can't archive a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Now let me, here, here.
W. Curtis Preston:I like analogies.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, grape juice.
W. Curtis Preston:Is grape juice.
W. Curtis Preston:Everybody knows what grape juice is like Welch is grape juice, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know if you're outside of the states that that might not be,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's a
W. Curtis Preston:you know what grape juice is, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know what wine is?
W. Curtis Preston:Wine is also grape juice,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yep,
W. Curtis Preston:but it's made for a different purpose and you u and and
W. Curtis Preston:it's made with a different process.
W. Curtis Preston:Both involves putting grape juice in a bottle and leaving it
W. Curtis Preston:there for long periods of time.
W. Curtis Preston:One is made slightly different than the other, and as a result,
W. Curtis Preston:you get a very different result.
W. Curtis Preston:One will get you drunk, one will not, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You can't take a bottle of Welch's grape juice, set it on a shelf for, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:five years and expect to get drunk on it.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and the same result, you can't open a bottle of Chardonnay
W. Curtis Preston:and give it to a five year old
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you could, but depending on what country you're in.
W. Curtis Preston:The results will be unpredictable.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, there's a funny, there's a funny, um, ticker that I, I look at, her
W. Curtis Preston:name's Miss Sutter Southern and she's this, um, lessons in teaching
W. Curtis Preston:that they're never gonna tell you.
W. Curtis Preston:She had, it's very, she has all these cute little stories and she had this, this.
W. Curtis Preston:This dispute in like kindergarten or first grade or something, and they, they
W. Curtis Preston:had a bet and, and the winning bet, what was going to the person that won the bet
W. Curtis Preston:or the loser had to bring in the other person, one of his sparkling waters.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:So he brought in sparkling water and then the next day
W. Curtis Preston:the kid was acting a little goofy and wanting to go pee a lot and everything.
W. Curtis Preston:And then, uh, she looked in the can and it was a, it was a truly,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:his mom stored her trulys right next to which again,
W. Curtis Preston:if you're not in the States, that is a carbonated alcoholic beverage
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:And she, uh, uh, she's like, not my fault.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, So, yeah, so old backups don't magically turn into archives.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, they're just really old backups.
W. Curtis Preston:So here is my definition of an archive, some of which will sound familiar.
W. Curtis Preston:If you listened to last week's episode.
W. Curtis Preston:An archive is a copy of data stored in a separate location.
W. Curtis Preston:So far we're the same, made to serve as a reference copy and stored with
W. Curtis Preston:enough metadata to find the data in question without knowing where it came.
W. Curtis Preston:So that's very different sounding than, we'll, we'll cover those
W. Curtis Preston:phrases, just like what we did.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, um, so what differentiates an archive from a backup is why you made it
W. Curtis Preston:and, and how you're gonna store it, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, and again, I, I, I was trying to come up with a definition.
W. Curtis Preston:That would fit many different types of archives.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, so let's talk about, let's talk about a couple of
W. Curtis Preston:different types of archives.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, one, the first type of archive I remember having anything to do
W. Curtis Preston:with was actually, uh, in my early
W. Curtis Preston:legato days.
W. Curtis Preston:Remember Lego.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yes, I do.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:by the way.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I always thought about, by the way, are, I don't know how much
W. Curtis Preston:musical, um, you know, training you have, but what does legato mean in music?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:It's the opposite of staccato.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Chicago's fast, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, staccato is,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:you know, like short, short burst.
W. Curtis Preston:Ligato means like long and slow.
W. Curtis Preston:Like I've never understood
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Why you call it that?
W. Curtis Preston:Why they called it Ligado when that means like, slow it down.
W. Curtis Preston:I've never quite understood that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, , it's the opposite of staccato.
W. Curtis Preston:They should have called it staccato networker anyway.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so yeah, so, so what they had and other backup products had, they
W. Curtis Preston:had this concept of an archive.
W. Curtis Preston:And what they would do is you would identify a bunch of files.
W. Curtis Preston:They would go in this archive.
W. Curtis Preston:They would put it in this archive, which meant they sort
W. Curtis Preston:of stored them all together.
W. Curtis Preston:Generally speaking, this puts it into something like, or akin to like a tarball.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, obviously networker didn't use tar, but, but it's akin to that.
W. Curtis Preston:And then you had to give it some metadata allow you to find.
W. Curtis Preston:Again in the future.
W. Curtis Preston:So you would put a bunch of stuff together and you'd say, this is the
W. Curtis Preston:Albatross 2023 project, so that when it's.
W. Curtis Preston:10 years from now, you all you would need to remember is the name of the project or
W. Curtis Preston:whatever it is that you, you put it there.
W. Curtis Preston:You'd have to go, well, we need, we need, remember, we need
W. Curtis Preston:the Albatross project of 2023.
W. Curtis Preston:You would do a retrieve.
W. Curtis Preston:By the way, that's what you do with archives is you retrieve
W. Curtis Preston:them, you don't restore them.
W. Curtis Preston:We defined what a restore was last week, and when you do that retrieve, you get
W. Curtis Preston:all of the stuff that was put in that box.
W. Curtis Preston:This, I liken it to the cold case
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, I was just thinking about the cold case, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You put everything, all evidence associated with the case in a box
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and you put it in the shelf, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then when you wanna retrieve it, you go, you find the box, you pull
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the box out, you open the box, and it has everything that you needed.
W. Curtis Preston:and the box is named by the name of the case, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Probably the name of the, the decedent by the.
W. Curtis Preston:the deceased.
W. Curtis Preston:Deceased.
W. Curtis Preston:You learn so much grammar on this show.
W. Curtis Preston:Deceased is a state.
W. Curtis Preston:The decedent is a person, the decedent is deceased.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, but they, they, it's just in tv.
W. Curtis Preston:They often say the deceased and they, they're referring to a
W. Curtis Preston:person, and I'm like, deceased is an adjective, decedent is a noun.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:know what?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I bet you, so I watch a lot of N C I S.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think they wrong on the show.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, they're wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:They're, I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know if I've ever seen a show that gets that word correct.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because even the medical examiner, he always says the deceased,
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, it's not the deceased, it's the decedent.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, also, what do you do to an animal?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you kill it.
W. Curtis Preston:If an animal, if an animal is dead and you're trying
W. Curtis Preston:to figure out why, what do you do?
W. Curtis Preston:You perform a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Autopsy.
W. Curtis Preston:ne.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Autopsy
W. Curtis Preston:auto, you do autopsies on people you do NEPs on,
W. Curtis Preston:which is really just Latin for dead,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but um, yeah, the decedent,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So
W. Curtis Preston:patan crap that Curtis knows.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, by the way, also, uh, when you say, uh, I'm nauseous, that means
W. Curtis Preston:that you're sickening to look at it.
W. Curtis Preston:Doesn't mean that you're, what you mean to say is you're nauseated.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Are, are you really ? Are you picking up,
W. Curtis Preston:are you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm not gonna remember any of these things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're just gonna have
W. Curtis Preston:That's right.
W. Curtis Preston:That's right.
W. Curtis Preston:All right, so to serve as a reference, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So we talked about the stuff in the box.
W. Curtis Preston:Can you think about different types of archives?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was thinking
W. Curtis Preston:
Speaker:talked about one already.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, and, and I think the one I was thinking about was very similar,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so it's, you talked about, okay, you're done with the project.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Another case, maybe you're done with an application or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:with an entire infrastructure,
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're moving from on premises to the cloud, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you don't wanna get rid of all that on-prem data, but you want to archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Mm-hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And say, okay, all of this is related to the Oracle application
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or anything else, and keep it in a box in case later, you need to retrieve it.
W. Curtis Preston:Oracle version X from 2022.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Et cetera.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was also thinking about like projects.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:This is very similar projects.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, I always think about like drug research, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because drug research, you keep that around forever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But not all the time is it actively being used.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so typically they end up taking all of their research, archiving it, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So it's still available.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then when they have something that comes up or some issues, they can
Prasanna Malaiyandi:always go retrieve it and either do investigations on it, do additional
Prasanna Malaiyandi:research on it, et cetera, based on that.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so that is, those are all different examples
W. Curtis Preston:of one type of an archive.
W. Curtis Preston:There's another, there's, there's two others that they're closely related,
W. Curtis Preston:but, um, I actually, I think one is type of the other, but the other
W. Curtis Preston:phrase, and you said it already in the podcast, Is what do you remember?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't remember what I say on these things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't even remember what I said 30 seconds ago.
W. Curtis Preston:minutes
W. Curtis Preston:ago.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What did I say?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, my memory's really bad.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, email archives.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:There we
W. Curtis Preston:Email archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So what's an email archive now?
W. Curtis Preston:This one.
W. Curtis Preston:This one really sort of bridges like it's.
W. Curtis Preston:But, but I'm gonna accept the term email archive, cuz generally speaking, archives
W. Curtis Preston:for old stuff that isn't used anymore, email archive is a little bit different.
W. Curtis Preston:This is why, this is why the, the serve is a reference copy,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:So email archive might have e Well, if it's a proper sort
W. Curtis Preston:of normal email archive, it'll have emails that came in today,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:It will also have emails that came in seven years ago, depending
W. Curtis Preston:on what our retention is.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and why are we storing those emails,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:This is mainly for compliance, legal, issues, such
Prasanna Malaiyandi:as you get an eDiscovery case, or you want to go back and figure out was
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis really stealing money from the company and who was he communicating
Prasanna Malaiyandi:with and all the rest, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So
W. Curtis Preston:Those are all correct answers, not the answer I was looking for.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you know what the answer I was looking for was to serve as a reference?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:We, it's the reason we, you know, we're still backing up that email server, right?
W. Curtis Preston:If you have an email server, or if you had 365, you're still backing up 365, but,
W. Curtis Preston:but you also might have an email archive of 365 or Gmail or you know, inbox,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think one of the cases, just going back
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to that for reference, right, it's with the case of a backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you're doing a once a day backup during the day, someone might have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:gotten an email, deleted the email.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:When you back it up, it's not in the backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:in a backup, but it will be in a proper email archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Every email that comes in and every email that goes out, will, goes,
W. Curtis Preston:goes in that email archive, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So it's much better for compliance purposes.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so again, going with examples, so Google Workspace has Google Vault.
W. Curtis Preston:It is an email archive for Google for Gmail.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Guess what?
W. Curtis Preston:It's not.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Now back up for Gmail.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not a backup or Gmail.
W. Curtis Preston:It's got all the same stuff, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It's got every email.
W. Curtis Preston:In fact, it's got more based on your thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Just a minute ago, it's got more than a backup would have,
W. Curtis Preston:assuming that, you know, somebody actually cleared out their, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Inbox.
W. Curtis Preston:recycle.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, but I guess the question is walking through this, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So you have your archive, you have the retrieve,
W. Curtis Preston:Mm-hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Could I not use the retrieve even though it has more than what may
Prasanna Malaiyandi:have ever existed at a point in time, been a plausible point in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:time, if that's what I'm looking for.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I not satisfy bringing data back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know it's not a restore because it was never to a valid point in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:time that existed, but could I still use that to get back data?
W. Curtis Preston:I would shorten your answer to, can I
W. Curtis Preston:use an archive to do a restore?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, let me ask, let me ask you this question.
W. Curtis Preston:Can I use your Tesla to haul fertilizer?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yes, but I wouldn't recommend it or I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:wouldn't want that to happen.
W. Curtis Preston:And it, and it would be highly inefficient, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I could only put like, you know, a certain number of bags.
W. Curtis Preston:Hopefully we did it in bags.
W. Curtis Preston:God forbid I have raw you know, and, you know, I gotta, I got a
W. Curtis Preston:front end loader with fertilizer and we're gonna use your Tesla.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but you gotta like, it's like, no, you don't have a hatchback.
W. Curtis Preston:You gotta, you have a, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so the answer is kind of,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It can be, but not intended.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:with a giant butt.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:reminds me of, uh, Peewee Herman's big adventure.
W. Curtis Preston:Everybody I know has a big, but anyway, it was the, it was the, the
W. Curtis Preston:naughtiest line in that G-rated movie.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, the, um, and I'm five years old, so I still remember
W. Curtis Preston:that line from 40 years ago.
W. Curtis Preston:Anyway, um, he, um, Sorry, I totally, I totally
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So you can use an archive for a
W. Curtis Preston:will be really, really difficult to accomplish
W. Curtis Preston:the same function, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So here's, and, and you, you, you alluded to it earlier, the, the
W. Curtis Preston:number one problem is, well, sort of two problems, is it's not designed
W. Curtis Preston:to do that, which means you can't say, you can't say to a pure archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Give me all the emails that were in my inbox yesterday.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:You can't do that.
W. Curtis Preston:You can say, give me all the emails that were sent to me in the last
W. Curtis Preston:five years or in the last year.
W. Curtis Preston:Now, if you've got emails in your inbox that are from six months ago and you
W. Curtis Preston:say, give me all the emails from the last month, you're gonna get all the
W. Curtis Preston:emails from the last month, including all the ones that you've deleted.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and if, if you do it, you know, for the last,
W. Curtis Preston:and, and if you've got emails that are in your inbox that you're keeping
W. Curtis Preston:around, you know, a lot of people keep mail emails from forever, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Not.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm an
W. Curtis Preston:And if you owe your inbox zero, you know, whatever,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, I'm like inbox 4k, but whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, the um, You, you can, you, you, again, assuming it's a pure
W. Curtis Preston:archive product, you cannot restore, you cannot do a point in time restore
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:of your inbox.
W. Curtis Preston:And also many archive systems can't put the folders back, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because again, it's not worried about that.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not it's purpose.
W. Curtis Preston:It's purpose is to be able to find the one email where Prasanna said naughty words,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I, I, I think we should highlight, I think we should drill a little bit
Prasanna Malaiyandi:deeper for folks point in time, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think that's sometimes not understood.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you wanna sort of walk through
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, it's last week we talked about backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup is to restore something.
W. Curtis Preston:Two, a single point in time.
W. Curtis Preston:That's all we're saying.
W. Curtis Preston:When you do a restore, remember I said you do the, let me just, uh, what did I say?
W. Curtis Preston:I, I've got it here.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's see here.
W. Curtis Preston:It's right at the end of my.
W. Curtis Preston:Here it is a restore.
W. Curtis Preston:Returns a single thing to a single point in time.
W. Curtis Preston:That's it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes, you can do multiple restores, but each
W. Curtis Preston:restore restores a single thing, a single database, a single file,
W. Curtis Preston:a single file system, a single server to a single point in time.
W. Curtis Preston:I want this server to the way it looked yesterday.
W. Curtis Preston:You cannot do a point in time restore, as it's called, to
W. Curtis Preston:using a pure archive system.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay?
W. Curtis Preston:Again, I am well aware that there are products like that
W. Curtis Preston:do both with a single copy.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm fine with that.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:, um, it's just a pure archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Cannot do a point in time restore, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It messes up all the folders.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and more than likely what you will get is way too much stuff to be useful.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it also doesn't understand the concept of red and not red, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It, it is just gonna put all the, all the emails.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:It doesn't care.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so that's what I was talking about to serve.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, so there's a third.
W. Curtis Preston:A third type of archive is um, uh, an active archive, which is really just,
W. Curtis Preston:uh, and we've had guys from the active archive on the podcast where basically
W. Curtis Preston:this is the idea that I'm going to keep.
W. Curtis Preston:Actively use data in the primary file system.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm gonna keep lesser used data out in this other secondary file system.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe object storage.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe tape, maybe object storage on tape, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe S3 or act or um, glacier or whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it's sort of this two tiered
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like a tiered file system
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it's like a tiered file system.
W. Curtis Preston:And the idea is that why would you do that?
W. Curtis Preston:And cost is really the only.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, reason for that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, by moving the, the lesser used data out of the primary file system,
W. Curtis Preston:we reduced the size of the file system.
W. Curtis Preston:We also reduced the pain it takes to back it up,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, I think another benefit too with those
Prasanna Malaiyandi:types of active archive systems is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Sometimes people don't know what needs to be archived, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:We all like to think, oh, it's just gonna be based on files or what's most
Prasanna Malaiyandi:frequently used, but a lot of times people don't know, and that's been the challenge
Prasanna Malaiyandi:with storage systems, which is why primary storage is always like continuously grown.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But now with these techniques, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Where to an end user, it's seamless.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The fact that data is moving off to archive storage,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:lower cost storage, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's seamless to the end user, but helps the storage admin
Prasanna Malaiyandi:save significantly on costs.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So when they go, when they go to retrieve, again, there's that word when
W. Curtis Preston:they go to retrieve a file that hasn't been archived, it just automatically
W. Curtis Preston:comes back and it, you know, it just creates, you know, you just get a
W. Curtis Preston:little, little hourglass for, you know, a few seconds depending on the size.
W. Curtis Preston:You just make sure you train
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The people.
W. Curtis Preston:educate your users so that they know that when
W. Curtis Preston:they get that little hourglass, they don't just start rebooting
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:Or if they do, they reboot and they're like, oh, I fixed it.
W. Curtis Preston:Because now it's restored.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Or retrieved.
W. Curtis Preston:We wanna talk about the phrase in the definition stored with
W. Curtis Preston:additional metadata, a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Typically doesn't have a lot of metadata associated with, other than
W. Curtis Preston:name a file, date and directory.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the stuff we talked about in the backup episode.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, typically an archive is going to have more metadata.
W. Curtis Preston:We talked about some of it already, like project name.
W. Curtis Preston:If it's an email archive, it's gonna have a ton of metadata.
W. Curtis Preston:It's gonna have the, the, you know, all the metadata associated with the email,
W. Curtis Preston:which is like the from and the two and the subject and all of those things.
W. Curtis Preston:. Um, and it may have the full text content of the actual, uh, thing, whatever
W. Curtis Preston:it is, the email or the document.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and why do you do that with an archive?
W. Curtis Preston:And you don't do it with the backup, and that's because of
W. Curtis Preston:the way retrieves work, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, we don't necessarily know what, when or how the thing.
W. Curtis Preston:We just know that, you know, there was an email.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember seeing an.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I, I, I, uh, I, I worked in Twitter back in that crazy year
W. Curtis Preston:of 2022, and I remember getting an email from the boss at that time.
W. Curtis Preston:That said that I had to work long hours and uh, stuff and you know, or click
W. Curtis Preston:here by five o'clock or I'm gonna get fired with three months severance.
W. Curtis Preston:I remember that email.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't remember, I don't remember when it was sent or I don't know
W. Curtis Preston:the name of the e It's now 2030.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm filing a lawsuit about what happened back in 2022.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but I.
W. Curtis Preston:A couple of key phrases in that email, and so I'm gonna search on the full body
W. Curtis Preston:of that email, and I very much remember the name of the guy that sent that email.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know what I'm talking about.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just making stuff up here.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so you store a lot of metadata with an archive that you wouldn't
W. Curtis Preston:typically store in a backup system.
W. Curtis Preston:You don't typically go to a backup person and say, I want you to
W. Curtis Preston:restore all the, all the documents that have the word, blah, blah in
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You don't do, that's not how backups typically work, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, again, there are some backups that go both ways, but generally
W. Curtis Preston:speaking, backups, you need the name of the server, the name of the
W. Curtis Preston:directory, the name of the file.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think that's a key with archives just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:because of how long the data may be sitting in the system, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or it may exist that you need to be able to retrieve from.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Those servers might have come and gone, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That initially had that data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You may not even know what the name of that server was,
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to find that based on other metadata becomes
Prasanna Malaiyandi:critical because you don't care, oh, it was stored on Apollo versus
Prasanna Malaiyandi:whatever other server name, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You only care, Hey, this is a project I care about, or this
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is the information I care.
W. Curtis Preston:ask yourself if you know the name of the exchange
W. Curtis Preston:server from seven years ago.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No
W. Curtis Preston:No.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, so I, I have this from, you know, under what is a retrieve, right?
W. Curtis Preston:As mentioned previously, a restore needs the name of a server directory,
W. Curtis Preston:database, file system, file name, table name, and actual date that
W. Curtis Preston:you want to restore the system too.
W. Curtis Preston:When doing a retrieve, you typically have none of that information, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You, you, it's so much more vague.
W. Curtis Preston:The other thing is quite often a retrieve is for a period of time,
W. Curtis Preston:not a single point in time, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It is like, gimme all the emails from Elon dot musk
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For 2022.
W. Curtis Preston:for 2022, uh, period, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Give all the emails from the tumultuous time period of October and November.
W. Curtis Preston:This has gotta be over.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, you can't keep, I don't think he could be this tumultuous for that long.
W. Curtis Preston:But anyway, whatever the phrase is, give me all the emails that, that, uh, elon
W. Curtis Preston:dot musk twitter.com sent, you know, from October, 2022 until November of
W. Curtis Preston:2023, when he sold it for $15 billion.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, because I'm an investor or something and I'm going to, you know, sue 'em.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:A retrieve looks like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:That's a very specific, you know, gimme a single person to emails.
W. Curtis Preston:All the emails they ever sent for three years.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You have
W. Curtis Preston:it it is e.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:That is the number one reason that archives are used is e-discovery.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'll give you a a perfect example.
W. Curtis Preston:I worked as a consultant on a project where we had a bank.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a, it was a, not a bank, but a, like a financial institution,
W. Curtis Preston:like an invest investment type place.
W. Curtis Preston:And they got sued and they wanted the, the, um, the plaintiff was requesting an
W. Curtis Preston:e-discovery request of all the emails in the last three years, and they didn't have
W. Curtis Preston:an archive system, so what they had to do was they had to, they had a weekly full
W. Curtis Preston:backup of exchange, and so they had to do a restorative exchange to January 1st.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Alternate server.
W. Curtis Preston:Alternate server exchange, restore, which for the record
W. Curtis Preston:is not the easiest thing to do.
W. Curtis Preston:And you have to make sure that that exchange server doesn't come to life.
W. Curtis Preston:And start sending mail, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and start deleting mail cuz you know Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Retention periods and all that.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, so you, you do an alternate server, alternate time, restore of exchange.
W. Curtis Preston:You do the search, you create a PST file, and then you do a restore for January 8th,
W. Curtis Preston:and then you do all that all over again.
W. Curtis Preston:Then you do a restore for January 15th, and you do that all over again cuz they
W. Curtis Preston:had every for 52 weeks, times three years.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:oh my gosh,
W. Curtis Preston:So a hundred and what is that?
W. Curtis Preston:It's 156 restores.
W. Curtis Preston:This was a huge project.
W. Curtis Preston:We had a team of like 15 expensive consultants doing restores around
W. Curtis Preston:the clock for like three months.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Because you also have limited resort.
W. Curtis Preston:This was, this is pre-cloud, so we couldn't do, we couldn't do this.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, it was also limited tape, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It was tape.
W. Curtis Preston:So you, you there was only so many tape drives.
W. Curtis Preston:So we could only do as many restores as we had tape drives and um, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, and we're all goo gooing it.
W. Curtis Preston:There you go.
W. Curtis Preston:There's another verb.
W. Curtis Preston:Me, verbing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Eh, using the
W. Curtis Preston:this in a, in a, in using a gooey, by the way that that phrase
W. Curtis Preston:dates me, no one calls it a gooey anymore.
W. Curtis Preston:And long story short, I remember that that thing cost a client
W. Curtis Preston:a couple of million bucks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, I could imagine with that many people, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Where they could have probably bought an email archive solution
W. Curtis Preston:If they had had
Prasanna Malaiyandi:less.
W. Curtis Preston:they could have done a single retrieve.
W. Curtis Preston:Give me all emails with these phrases in it.
W. Curtis Preston:For the last three years.
W. Curtis Preston:Go.
W. Curtis Preston:There's your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:they purchase an email archive solution after that?
W. Curtis Preston:Yes, they did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay,
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so people learn, which is good.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, um, there, there's a, see if I was looking forward in the chapter
W. Curtis Preston:here, but here, here's another way I like, this is a phrase that I coin.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, no one uses it, but , this is a phrase that I coined.
W. Curtis Preston:A backup is the secondary copy of primary data, and an archive is
W. Curtis Preston:the primary copy of secondary data.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's typically the only copy,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right?
W. Curtis Preston:Don't mess with my sentence, man.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, . But so backup is the secondary copy of primary data, meaning
W. Curtis Preston:it's the other copy of the really important actively used data.
W. Curtis Preston:And then archive is the primary copy.
W. Curtis Preston:Often the only.
W. Curtis Preston:Of sec of data that has secondary value.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So another copy of the email.
W. Curtis Preston:But in most ca so email archive is probably the most used type of archive.
W. Curtis Preston:The other type, the active archive and the sort of old school archive.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, in fact, I remember with, with with Networker that if you selected
W. Curtis Preston:a bunch of files and then you said archive them, once the archive was
W. Curtis Preston:successful and it made two copies, it would actually delete the primary.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because at that point, that's the purpose, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because you're archiving for some reason,
W. Curtis Preston:right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it's no longer needed on the primary.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, we, um, we actually had, you know, there's actually chapter 10 in the book
W. Curtis Preston:where we actually go into more detail into different types of archives.
W. Curtis Preston:That was the chapter that, uh, Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Fri wrote who, um, is a fan of the pod and, and a guest of
W. Curtis Preston:the pod we might have him on.
W. Curtis Preston:When we get,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Would we talk about that chapter?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I, so I, I just, again, going back to the backup and the archive, um,
W. Curtis Preston:can I use a backup to do eDiscovery?
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I just gave you a story of, the answer is yes, but it will
W. Curtis Preston:be one of the most painful and expensive processes you've ever done.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It wasn't built for that purpose.
W. Curtis Preston:It wasn't built for that purpose, you know, a.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like apo.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's like
W. Curtis Preston:It's like . It's like a.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Aor, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:A fork is good for one thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:A spoon is good for different purposes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Apo not really great for either purpose.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It gets by, but
W. Curtis Preston:it's like the, one of the most worthless things on the
W. Curtis Preston:planet, I have to say, is the sports.
W. Curtis Preston:Whoever invented, I hope you got millions of dollars, but I hate sports.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, the only time I see sports, you know, who does sports?
W. Curtis Preston:Sports?
W. Curtis Preston:Kfc.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm,
W. Curtis Preston:puts sports in their, um, in their food.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know why I would know that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:for like mac and cheese and mashed potatoes and stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, anyway, the, the, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Ex exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:It's, it's, it's just, um, like if you've never tried to do any,
W. Curtis Preston:because the thing is with an e-discovery request, I don't know the
W. Curtis Preston:server, I don't know the directory.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know the name of the file.
W. Curtis Preston:I know that it's files owned.
W. Curtis Preston:This person files or emails with this content in them, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The company's been accused of, uh, an un what's it called?
W. Curtis Preston:The, a hostile work environment.
W. Curtis Preston:There, there was a, there was a person in, in Department X
W. Curtis Preston:that, um, used a particular word.
W. Curtis Preston:He used it every other.
W. Curtis Preston:Every other word.
W. Curtis Preston:And even though he was asked to not use that word, he used that
W. Curtis Preston:word all the time, and he used it in emails and, and his bosses knew
W. Curtis Preston:it, and they, they wouldn't stop.
W. Curtis Preston:And so you prove that with an email archive, with a e-discovery request.
W. Curtis Preston:You ask for all the emails from that person containing that word, right?
W. Curtis Preston:And then you look and, and then you look at that and you're like, look,
W. Curtis Preston:look at all these emails where, hi, hi.
W. Curtis Preston:His boss was, His boss never once let's also search the boss's email to, you know?
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You could basically, that's the purpose of what a discovery request
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And you can't say I,
W. Curtis Preston:world you would do that with a backup system.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And you can't say, I'm not gonna do this because
Prasanna Malaiyandi:we don't have the technical ability.
W. Curtis Preston:You can't do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:That, that is, that is a surefire way to have What, so we talked about this
W. Curtis Preston:with the interview of the, um, um, with Joseph Dehner, the, the lawyer.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, we talked about this concept of adverse inference.
W. Curtis Preston:So it, it, it means that the judge in charge of a case will infer from your
W. Curtis Preston:behavior, something adverse to your case.
W. Curtis Preston:The judge will say, they say they don't have it or that they can't get it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, nobody could be that incompetent, et cetera.
W. Curtis Preston:They're trying to hide something.
W. Curtis Preston:So whatever the plaintiff says they were doing, just assumed that they were doing
W. Curtis Preston:it and, and, and move forward accordingly.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the, the, the famous case and I talked about it on that podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:There was a famous case, a well known.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, financial trading firm, and they were sued and they had
W. Curtis Preston:used their backups as archives.
W. Curtis Preston:Let this be a lesson to you kids.
W. Curtis Preston:They had used their backups as their archives, and they had changed
W. Curtis Preston:email systems multiple times.
W. Curtis Preston:They had changed backup systems multiple times.
W. Curtis Preston:They had changed tape system multiple times, and so the restore was like a much
W. Curtis Preston:more complicated version of the one that I, that I talked about a few minutes.
W. Curtis Preston:And they also, you know, their, their tape storage system wasn't the best either.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they had taken an inordinately amount of, an inordinate amount of time
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:do the retrieve, and then they eventually, there's
W. Curtis Preston:a process that you certify that the retrieve is finished.
W. Curtis Preston:They did that process and then they came back and they said,
W. Curtis Preston:crap, we found another box of tape.
W. Curtis Preston:, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The judge was like, you know what, you know I'm done with you people.
W. Curtis Preston:Nobody can be this bad at it, and backups and archives and stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:And so he's like, I'm issuing an adverse inference instruction to the
W. Curtis Preston:jury, which basically said, you know, you whatever, whatever the plaintiff
W. Curtis Preston:said is on the tapes it's on the tapes because I, we got, we gotta move on.
W. Curtis Preston:And so they lost.
W. Curtis Preston:It was like a 2 billion lawsuit.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh my gosh.
W. Curtis Preston:um, because they, because they
W. Curtis Preston:use their backups as archives.
W. Curtis Preston:This is why I make such a big deal over the difference
W. Curtis Preston:between backups and archives.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not just cause I am, you know, a pedantic individual, which I am.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, we've, I've given you some other examples like golf
W. Curtis Preston:and, and nauseous and nauseated.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, what was it?
W. Curtis Preston:Deceased and
W. Curtis Preston:decedent.
W. Curtis Preston:These are all really important words.
W. Curtis Preston:Words mean things.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, um, but it, it, you know, it's sort of like the
W. Curtis Preston:joke of like, let's eat grandma.
W. Curtis Preston:Let's eat grandma, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Commas, you know, comma saves commas, save lives, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, words matter, and it's important to understand the difference
W. Curtis Preston:between backup and archive.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm fine if you produce a product that does both things.
W. Curtis Preston:Just make sure you do both things.
W. Curtis Preston:Just don't use that phrase.
W. Curtis Preston:We're gonna archive a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:It hurts my ears.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Just like it hurts my ears when you say you're going golfing.
W. Curtis Preston:But that one I, I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You can't do anything
W. Curtis Preston:gave that argument of Yeah, I can't do anything about it.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't have a golfing podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:Oh, I'm sorry.
W. Curtis Preston:A golf podcast.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, Curtis
W. Curtis Preston:podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:You got any final thoughts, Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:P?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:duh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, just.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like you said, just be aware that they are different.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Archive and backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Know the right context.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think the other question is also, I know we talked about this
Prasanna Malaiyandi:in organizations chapter, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But understand what the requirements are to help you decide.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do you need an archive system or a backup system, or both?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, if you live in America, I would
W. Curtis Preston:argue strongly that you need.
W. Curtis Preston:, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because we live in the most litigious society in the history.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know what it's like over there, you know, in other countries.
W. Curtis Preston:I know Joe talked a little bit about the differences in eDiscovery that we have
W. Curtis Preston:sort of the strongest e-discovery laws.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, you're gonna get sued for something.
W. Curtis Preston:And the cost of a, the cost of doing a retrieve from a backup, uh, is, is.
W. Curtis Preston:Ridiculous.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, don't use your backup system as an archive and honestly, don't use
W. Curtis Preston:your archive system as a backup, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Like Google Vault is an archive, not a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:You're gonna be very unhappy if you lose your whole inbox because of a
W. Curtis Preston:ransomware attack, and then you go to Google Vault and they can give you all the
W. Curtis Preston:emails you had for the last five years.
W. Curtis Preston:That is not what you're looking for.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:All right.
W. Curtis Preston:Hopefully you learned a thing or two.
W. Curtis Preston:And again, you know what?
W. Curtis Preston:If you wanna argue with me, reach out to me w Curtis Preston gmail,
W. Curtis Preston:or at WC preston on Twitter.
W. Curtis Preston:I'll tell you why you're wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, , remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.
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