After reading yet another story of a vendor in our space trying to stack the deck, I am reminded of my opinion that user-written reviews must be looked at with a very large grain of salt.  Click Read More to find out who the guilty party is this time.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

Someone defaced my site Friday evening and I had a really fun weekend (not).  Click Read More for the story.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

For me there have always been two storage events: Storage Decisions & Storage Networking World.  There are others, but these are the two I have historically missed only if forced to.  Now I’m switching one of them out for a show I’ll bet you’ve never heard of and I’ll tell you why in this blog entry.   Click Read More for more.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

I don’t care what your political affiliation is.  It’s a proud day to be an American. 
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

Bacula Systems is now the commercial arm for the popular open-source backup product Bacula.  “It roams the datacenter at night and sucks the vital essence from your computers.”  I’m not making that up.  This is the second open-source backup product to do such, with Zmanda preceding them.  Click Read More to see what I think about this.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

I’ve now seen some vendors saying things to the effect that “once you get 10:1, dedupe ratio doesn’t matter.”  They state that 10:1 saves 90% of disk, and 20:1 saves 95% of disk, so the difference is only 5% — so why is everyone so concerned about dedupe ratio?  To this 90%/95% comment I say, “balderdash!”  Click Read More to see more.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

This is what happens when you lose thousands of people’s data in today’s world.  Someone makes a hate video about you and posts it on Youtube.  Click Read More.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

It took all of a few seconds for an entire company and it’s 16,000 bloggers to disappear.  Now they’re gone forever.  Click Read More to see more, including an interesting note about one of the affected journalspace bloggers, who is actually quite famous among bloggers.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.

I’m building a very small focus group consisting of IT managers from “end-user” companies (i.e. not IT vendors).  I’d like to see what you (the eventual company’s target market) think about the idea before I start spending money to make it happen.

This will require a very small time committment.  A few emails, a few phone calls, and no travel — at least not for now.  If the idea gets funded and off the ground, things may change (if you want to continue the relationship).  But for right now, I just need a few smart people who see things from the end-user point of view.

If you’re interested, please send me an email.
Continue reading →

----- Signature and Disclaimer -----

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston). For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I've specialized in backup & recovery since 1993. I've written the O'Reilly books on backup and have worked with a number of native and commercial tools. I am now Chief Technologist at Druva, the leading provider of cloud-based data protection and data management tools for endpoints, infrastructure, and cloud applications. These posts reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily the opinion of my employer.