If you're encrypting the data on your hard drive using OS-level software encryption (e.g. Windows EFS, Vista BitBlocker, MacOS FileVault, Linux DM-Crypt, or TrueCrypt ), then a research study at Princeton University, partially funded by the Department of Homeland Security, has figured out how to read that data without your password.  Well, that's just great.

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----- 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 Technical Evangelist 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 kept reading stories like this one that said that Quantum’s dedupe is inline. Then I would hear from those “in the know” that said it was post-process. Different people at Quantum would say different things. Some would say that they run the dedupe at the same time as the ingest, so they considered it inline, although data is hitting disk before it’s deduped. They say since it only hits disk for a few seconds, it’s really inline. I said, “No it’s not.” So what’s the scoop? Read on to see. 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 Technical Evangelist 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.

Odd title, you say?  It was inspired by a Cybernetics whitepaper that I read this morning entitled "The Risks of a Disk-Only Backup Strategy."  You can read the whitepaper yourself by following this link.  While I actually have a fond place in my heart for Cybernetics, I think this paper isn't worth the paper I didn't print it on.  Click "Read More" to see why. 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 Technical Evangelist 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.