So many people are surprised when their restore is slower than their backup. You shouldn’t be, as it’s quite common. The good news is there are things you can do to make it faster – if you know them in advance. W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) and Prasanna Malaiyandi tackle the seven reasons why your restore may be slower than your backup. Topics covered include RAID penalties, tape...

Pat Mayock is a Data Protection Warrior for HPE, and he helped us to understand where he thinks LTO & RDX (a removable disk technology) sit in the market. He explains how much tape is used today in enterprise and cloud environments, especially in the public cloud that so many think is a tapeless world. He says the cloud vendors are some of LTO’s biggest customers! We talk about what LTO...

This whole episode is a Mr. Backup rant, where he talks about things that people should really stop doing with their backup systems, starting with backing up directly to tape. There is a place for tape, but it is NOT at the front end of the backup system. Curtis and Prasanna passionately discuss and explain several relics of the ways we used to do things, and why they no longer make sense...

This week we are joined by emergency preparedness expert and prolific author and speaker, Virginia Nicols, webmaster of EmergencyPlanGuide.org. We talk about why and how to prepare for a disaster/emergency in your personal life, as well as how to do it for a small business. This is a bit different than our usual episode, as there is very little talk about backup and recovery. We talk about where...

If you liked last week’s episode where we talked about this “so let’s talk about ransomware” series on reddit, you’ll love this week. We have the author, Snorkel42, to talk about the origins behind the security cadence series, and why he decided to finally write some on ransomware. (He explains that everything he talks about his ransomware, but he admits he’s...

This week, Prasanna and Mr. Backup (W. Curtis Preston) review a series of posts made by Snorkel42, who previously appeared on this podcast in the episode called “Security expert rips Okta for their response to hack.” Things were recorded out of order, so this is the episode where we discovered him on Reddit, and tried our best to distill several thousand words into about 30 mins of...

Vast is a massively-scalable storage system designed around multiple pieces of technology that weren’t available just a few years ago (e.g. NVMe, Storage class memory, QLC) that offers both file and object functionality, immutable snapshots, and integration with the cloud to address the “smoking hole” problem. Their typical sale (of which they’ve made many) is north of $1...

This episode is a unique look inside the Conti ransomware group, courtesy of a four-part series from Krebs on Security. We review the interesting takeaways from Brian Kreb’s series of over 12,000-words from quite a bit of research. The series was inspired by a hack of Conti that resulted in a traunch of internal documents being made public. This gives a unique view into how the organization...

This week we are joined by John “Ricky” Martin, Director of Strategy at NetApp (and former owner of a tape recovery business), to talk about his paper that declares that backup is fundamentally evil and done in an unintelligent way. Mr. Backup wasn’t sure how this one was going to go, and there were at least one or two arguments along the way. No blows were thrown, though. We...

We have none other than Snorkel42 from Reddit on the podcast today. He has 20 years experience in InfoSec, and is a prolific writer on Reddit under the handle Snorkel42. (Check out his posts here: ). (We will not be using his given name during the recording.). He thinks Okta managed to turn a mole hill into a mountain by incorrectly handling the hack that happened in January – that we just...