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Oct. 17, 2022

Why do we even back up? (Backup to Basics Series)

Why do we even back up?  (Backup to Basics Series)

We get right to the heart of the matter in this next episode of our Backup to Basics series. (See what we did there?). Why do we even back up? It is expensive, time consuming, and no one seems to want to be in charge of it, so we do we even do it anyway. This episode is based on Chapter 1 of W. Curtis Preston's latest O'Reilly book, Modern Data Protection, which you can download for free courtesy of Curtis' employer, Druva. Curtis believes there are three categories of reasons: human disasters, mechanical failures, and natural disasters. We talk about the odds of each of these happening, and how that's changed over the years.

The episode also starts with Mr. Backup telling the story of how he got into backup in the first place, as well as telling the story of the first time he lost data. It's the whole reason he ended up dedicating his career to backup, and he learned a lot of things from that failure.

Here are the links to other episodes we discuss in this episode of the pod.

Real Life Hurricane Disaster Recovery Story

Disaster Recovery after a hurricane - a First Hand Account

Stop Ransomware Attacks in Seconds. (Includes the Derecho story)

Mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript
W. Curtis Preston:

hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm your host w Curtis Preston, aka Mr.

W. Curtis Preston:

Backup, and have with me a guy that just like five minutes

W. Curtis Preston:

ago, compared me to a Luddite.

W. Curtis Preston:

Prasanna Malaiyandi . How's it going, Prasanna?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm good.

W. Curtis Preston:

Did, Did you or did you not compare me to a Luddite?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I did, and there was a reason I did.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right, which was you were.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Very used to a certain way of operating a, a piece of software,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

right, for the workflow.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And that software completely updated, but not everything was there.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And I think your complaint was, I just want things back the way they were.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, it's, you could put it that way,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I'm

W. Curtis Preston:

but I'm not, I'm not averse to technology or to new technology.

W. Curtis Preston:

I like things to get better, but it does, It is difficult when you're

W. Curtis Preston:

using a piece of software and then they're like, You know what?

W. Curtis Preston:

We had to just rip and replace.

W. Curtis Preston:

Like in order to get, in order to be where we wanted to be, we had to throw

W. Curtis Preston:

out the baby with the bath water.

W. Curtis Preston:

We had to, you know, you're gonna love what we have.

W. Curtis Preston:

Once you get used to it, I hope you hope you don't mind throwing away everything

W. Curtis Preston:

you've known after all this time.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You know what this reminds me of?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Every time someone updates a backup software app, like completely changes it

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

or pushes you, and everyone's like, No.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I remember, uh, at the old place I used to work that there was, I can't

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

remember what version of the backup software it was, but one version,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

they decided to change the color,

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

right, the color of the background, like what their standard

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

colors were and everyone complained.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And they basically had to undo it because they were like, We don't

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

understand what these colors are.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We don't like them.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Go back to the way they were before.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, I don't think my concern was that petty.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm just saying, but I'm just saying when the buttons that I used to press no longer

W. Curtis Preston:

work, you know, um, I'm just saying, I just, I just wanna edit my video.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But, but, but this is also kind of the.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Upside and downside of SaaS is things run really fast.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You get great new features, but because you're building so quickly, not everything

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

makes it over in those first releases, and sometimes you just gotta wait.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, and I'm, I'm not good at waiting, I don't think.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't know if you've figured that out yet or not.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm not good at delayed gratification.

W. Curtis Preston:

But, uh, so, uh, speaking of places that you used to work, I'll

W. Curtis Preston:

throw out our usual disclaimer.

W. Curtis Preston:

Prasanna works for Zoom.

W. Curtis Preston:

I work for Druva Now.

W. Curtis Preston:

This is not a podcast of either company and the opinions that you hear are ours.

W. Curtis Preston:

And, uh, one of which is apparently a Luddite.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and if you.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

True opinion.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's

W. Curtis Preston:

we would love for you to rate us.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, please rate us by going to your favorite podcatcher.

W. Curtis Preston:

Scroll down to where you give us the stars and give us a comment.

W. Curtis Preston:

We love the comments.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's great to hear from people.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and, uh, I really love when you reach out to me on LinkedIn.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's also great.

W. Curtis Preston:

If you wanna join the conversation, be on the podcast, just reach out to me at WC

W. Curtis Preston:

preston on Twitter or w Curtis Preston,

@gmail:

and, uh, we'll get you on.

@gmail:

And, um, so I wanna continue and, and, and almost continue

@gmail:

sort of go back to square one.

@gmail:

We talked about doing a back to the basics series and for some

@gmail:

reason we started the back.

@gmail:

We started sort of, I thought we started

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We didn't go far enough back

W. Curtis Preston:

We, yeah, we didn't go far enough back.

W. Curtis Preston:

And so I thought that a perfect place to go to, to look at the basics of

W. Curtis Preston:

backup would be this lovely book.

W. Curtis Preston:

Which I believe you helped, uh, edit sir.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, Modern Data Protection from O'Reilly and Associates, and, um,

W. Curtis Preston:

available at a bookstore near you.

W. Curtis Preston:

You can get an ebook version of this by going to druva.com/podcast

W. Curtis Preston:

and, um, you know, free of charge.

W. Curtis Preston:

In the beginning of this book, we have the, you know, what some might consider

W. Curtis Preston:

a fluff chapter, which is why we back up.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I, I thought there's no more basic question to answer.

W. Curtis Preston:

Then why do we do all of this?

W. Curtis Preston:

And I, I start the book with a story, which I know I've alluded to

W. Curtis Preston:

a couple of times on the podcast.

W. Curtis Preston:

I may have even told the whole version, but, hey, we're

W. Curtis Preston:

starting from scratch here.

W. Curtis Preston:

So I'm gonna tell this version.

W. Curtis Preston:

And this is basically how I got into backup.

W. Curtis Preston:

I was al, I was already in backup, but this is how I really got into it.

W. Curtis Preston:

You

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Wait before you get there,

W. Curtis Preston:

yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

do you wanna, because I don't think many of the

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

listeners really know, like, what

W. Curtis Preston:

How did I,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you do before you became Mr.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Backup?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Before you got into backup?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like, like where, Like how did you go from whatever it was

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you were doing into backup?

W. Curtis Preston:

Hmm.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I don't think a lot of people know

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that, and it's very different.

W. Curtis Preston:

Well, in, um, January of 1993, I got out of

W. Curtis Preston:

the US Navy and I was looking for work in the computer business.

W. Curtis Preston:

I had zero experience in computers.

W. Curtis Preston:

I had taken, I don't, I don't know if you're, if, do you remember

W. Curtis Preston:

the National Radio Institute?

W. Curtis Preston:

Do you remember that they, they had the ads back in, back in Popular Science.

W. Curtis Preston:

They had an ad like, Build your own

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

computer

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

build your own computer.

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

I did that while I was out to see, I took this correspondence course.

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

This is pre-internet, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

Um, you got, you got a, like a book and you worked through that book and

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

it was like q and a and then, you know, and then once you got all done,

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

then you built a computer and it was an 8088 for those of you I remember.

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

So I built my own computer and that was literally the extent of

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

my computer experience, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

And I got outta the Navy and I managed to get a job at a company called Digital

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

Systems, which was a, um, a company that it put in, um, it was called Intelligent.

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

Blended call management systems.

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

You might call it an auto dialer.

W. Curtis Preston:

Speaker:

Um, auto

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Robo caller.

W. Curtis Preston:

was a naughty word or a robo caller.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, that was a naughty word.

W. Curtis Preston:

That was sort of the dumb machine that didn't have the

W. Curtis Preston:

intelligence that ours had.

W. Curtis Preston:

But anyway, that's what, that was the very first job, but only like,

W. Curtis Preston:

Three or four months later, I secured a job via a great connection.

W. Curtis Preston:

That would be my wife, um, at what at that time was the second largest credit

W. Curtis Preston:

card company, and that would be mbna.

W. Curtis Preston:

And, um, I got the job of the backup guy and um, I was in charge of the

W. Curtis Preston:

backups for our entire data center, which at that time was 15 servers.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, they were DEC.

W. Curtis Preston:

We also had the first computer designed for Unix, AT&T SV 3B2.

W. Curtis Preston:

And, um, Uh, and I started with little tiny with, uh, little tiny,

W. Curtis Preston:

uh, cartridges and tapes and whatnot.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

how big was the environment?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know you said 15 servers, but how much data approximately

W. Curtis Preston:

so the entire data center, when I left, i d so

W. Curtis Preston:

when I joined it was probably the whole data center was 50 gigabytes.

W. Curtis Preston:

because it was literally like 11 servers.

W. Curtis Preston:

In fact, it was probably smaller than that because our biggest server

W. Curtis Preston:

I remember was five gigabytes.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was huge.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was five gigabytes and it took us all weekend to get a full backup of it.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, And, uh, and the other servers were much smaller than that, so

W. Curtis Preston:

it was probably, maybe even 30 gigabytes as the whole data center.

W. Curtis Preston:

But by the time I left, it was much larger.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was like 300 gigabytes

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

and 100 of those 300 gigabytes was a single server.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was a, it was an HP T 500.

W. Curtis Preston:

It had a hundred gigabytes.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I was like, How in the hell am I ever gonna back all this up?

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, because it had a, it had a four gigabyte tape drive and I was like,

W. Curtis Preston:

so, Are you gonna give me an FTE to stand here and swap tapes all night?

W. Curtis Preston:

And that's how I got my first automated table library, by the way.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There you go.

W. Curtis Preston:

But, uh, yeah, so, um, in the midst of all of that, I had

W. Curtis Preston:

been the backup person for a few months and we lost our purchasing database.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was an Oracle database.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, the name of the server was Paris.

W. Curtis Preston:

It had been recently migrated.

W. Curtis Preston:

It had only been on Paris.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't know, like a month or two, a couple of months.

W. Curtis Preston:

And the roughly, slightly less time than how long I'd been at

W. Curtis Preston:

the company, whatever that was.

W. Curtis Preston:

And.

W. Curtis Preston:

I did what I was told to do.

W. Curtis Preston:

I went, I looked at the logs to see if the dump was good, cuz we used dump in

W. Curtis Preston:

those days and the dump wasn't good.

W. Curtis Preston:

So then I looked at the day before dump wasn't good, I looked at the

W. Curtis Preston:

day before and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I finally found the tape that was, um, That was good.

W. Curtis Preston:

And it was, uh, six weeks and one day old, and I knew that I had the transaction

W. Curtis Preston:

logs along that time, so I was, you know, I'm thinking that that'll work.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, the only problem was that, um, the, our retention period was uh, six weeks

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh my

W. Curtis Preston:

so the last good backup was just, had just been overwritten.

W. Curtis Preston:

And so I remember, you know, my boss Susan Davidson.

W. Curtis Preston:

I remember her standing over me and saying, So let me get this straight.

W. Curtis Preston:

We have no backups of Paris whatsoever.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I said, That is what I'm saying.

W. Curtis Preston:

And.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, to her credit, she attributed the problem to, to bad training.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's you Ron.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, to bad training.

W. Curtis Preston:

And what what had happened was we had migrated the server.

W. Curtis Preston:

Nobody had told me that there was this, this, um, chron job that had been shutting

W. Curtis Preston:

the database down for the backups.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I learned a lot of valuable lessons, or I took, I, I.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't know a lot of who I am and how I do things come all the

W. Curtis Preston:

way back to that first episode.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't like, like a completely separated cron job that's

W. Curtis Preston:

doing something for my backup.

W. Curtis Preston:

Before I do the backup, I want the backup to kick off the cron job.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

What, You know what I'm saying?

W. Curtis Preston:

the CRO job kicks off the backup that kicks off the job.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, I need coordination and I've always, you know, when every, when anybody

W. Curtis Preston:

starts talking to me about two separate processes that are gonna handle, you

W. Curtis Preston:

know, that are gonna do this, if they don't have a handshake mechanism, I

W. Curtis Preston:

get very, very nervous because of that.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, cuz I continued to back up the database all the time while

W. Curtis Preston:

the database was changing and not putting it into hot backup.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's like the case where a lot of people are like, Oh

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

yeah, I just take a snapshot, and then someone just dumps that off the tape.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's like, what happens if the thing that did the snapshot failed for some

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

reason, you're now gonna think you have a successful backup, and guess what?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You don't.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I understand that that's something.

W. Curtis Preston:

Oracle DBAs fight over the, the DBAs want to be in charge of their

W. Curtis Preston:

backups, but the backup person has to be in charge of the backup system.

W. Curtis Preston:

So how do you get those two, you know, to, to get together?

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, we could have a whole episode just about that.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, we probably should have an whole

W. Curtis Preston:

episode

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I spent quite a bit of my career focused on that one problem.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

, you did.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Before you talk about like the reasons we back up, I

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

think it's important to state that you back up not because you want to back up.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's like you had said, you need to make sure that you're able to recover your

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

database, your application, whatever it is, whenever something happens, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That's the entire purpose of doing backups is

W. Curtis Preston:

you

W. Curtis Preston:

only need to back up if you wanna restore

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, exactly.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, the only reason I had kids,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because you wanted to restore some place,

W. Curtis Preston:

No.

W. Curtis Preston:

So that I could have a grandkid.

W. Curtis Preston:

They're way better than kids.

W. Curtis Preston:

She's sitting right outside there.

W. Curtis Preston:

She's adorable.

W. Curtis Preston:

And she's nine and I'll take her over either of my two kids.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, but the thing is, you gotta have kids before you can have.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's just the way it works.

W. Curtis Preston:

Same thing with backups.

W. Curtis Preston:

So I've divided the, the reasons that we back up the risks to

W. Curtis Preston:

your data into three groups.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, human disasters, mechanical failures, uh, and natural disasters.

W. Curtis Preston:

So, human disasters to me are things that humans cause.

W. Curtis Preston:

We can think of all sorts of categories of those.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I'm gonna give what I still think is the number, the

W. Curtis Preston:

number one reason we restore.

W. Curtis Preston:

What's that?

W. Curtis Preston:

What do you think that.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

User did something dumb.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's exactly right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I accidentally deleted a folder and

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I intended to only delete a file.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oops.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Or I think I still, I can't remember.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think you have a story, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Where someone had a script that accidentally deleted a file

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

server and erased all of the

W. Curtis Preston:

in the book.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

They were, What they were doing is they were purging home directories

W. Curtis Preston:

that were no longer for users that were no longer in the password file.

W. Curtis Preston:

. And so they were going, you know, home one and then they went to the, the first

W. Curtis Preston:

directory and then they'd look up the name of the directory in the password file.

W. Curtis Preston:

And if it wasn't there, cuz the name of the directory was

W. Curtis Preston:

just name of the, of the user.

W. Curtis Preston:

The problem was home one slash a slash all users beginning with a.

W. Curtis Preston:

And so they got to home one A looked up for a, in

W. Curtis Preston:

the password

W. Curtis Preston:

file they were there and then de Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

And they were half, they had deleted half the home directories before

W. Curtis Preston:

we figured out what was going.

W. Curtis Preston:

Oh Gonda.

W. Curtis Preston:

Okay.

W. Curtis Preston:

So, um, yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

like you said, most of 'em are.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

it's dumb stuff.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's, it's dumb stuff by users, dumb stuff by admins, dumb stuff by developers.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, you know, that sort of dumb stuff.

W. Curtis Preston:

And then we have bad stuff, right.

W. Curtis Preston:

That happens outside.

W. Curtis Preston:

This is, I think today we're starting to think of this as.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, the first is, I think the number one reason you need a backup system.

W. Curtis Preston:

This is the number one reason you need a good backup system.

W. Curtis Preston:

You need a really good backup n dr system, and that is malicious attacks,

W. Curtis Preston:

ransomware, you know, malware, um, you know, and internal threats, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, what do we call those?

W. Curtis Preston:

Rogue admins,

W. Curtis Preston:

right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Um,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Deleting all your data and going out, and I actually

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

just read about that recently.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Uh, who was it?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think someone recently got sentenced to jail because, uh, what did they do?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They had been fired from their company.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

They still had access to the passwords because the company had not cycled them.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so they logged into the company, deleted, changed the

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

accounts, locked them out.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think they might have deleted things as well.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And then their entire purpose was they wanted to be rehired for higher pay Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And just show their value.

W. Curtis Preston:

yeah, I think there was a little problem with this person's logic,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And so, yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Do you have rogue admins like this?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Where if you have someone who has a keys to the kingdom, or you don't

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

know all the places that people like, you don't have a proper onboarding

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

offboarding procedure to lock down your environment and delete things, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You can have people access your data, change things, delete things

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

like backup systems, all the

W. Curtis Preston:

And, and this, and this isn't a backup thing, but

W. Curtis Preston:

what do we learn from that kids?

W. Curtis Preston:

Have a proper onboarding and offboarding procedure.

W. Curtis Preston:

. I have been let go once or twice in my career, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, sometimes it was layoffs, sometimes it was a difference of opinion, and the um,

W. Curtis Preston:

as to whether or not I should be employed.

W. Curtis Preston:

I've had at least once where my account got disabled and then I

W. Curtis Preston:

got a call like a minute later.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's an off, that's an off boarding procedure.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

And by the way, I wasn't doing anything malicious.

W. Curtis Preston:

They weren't that, that was the off boarding procedure was your account was

W. Curtis Preston:

disabled, you were told to renew your password basically is what it looked like.

W. Curtis Preston:

You were told to renew your password and then boom, you,

W. Curtis Preston:

you know, you got the

W. Curtis Preston:

you got the call.

W. Curtis Preston:

Which is why to this day when I, when my password times out, which it does, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm like, Oh, what, what did I do?

W. Curtis Preston:

To this

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And it would be bad.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, and it would also be bad if that happened to just coincide with

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a one on one with your manager,

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

When, when you, um, Uh, yeah, and I had that happen last week where my, where

W. Curtis Preston:

my manager, they sent me a thing, you know, I, I have a weekly, you know, one

W. Curtis Preston:

on one and, and I had a, it was at three 30 on Monday afternoon, and suddenly it

W. Curtis Preston:

was, it was at nine 30 on Monday morning and I was like, Ooh, that's not good.

W. Curtis Preston:

What It turned out to be fine.

W. Curtis Preston:

Nothing was wrong, but that's what happens, you know, when you've

W. Curtis Preston:

been let go once or twice in your

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But, but, but, I think going back to the point, more people need to start

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

thinking about malicious actors,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Especially as they're designing backup systems, thinking about

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

disaster recovery, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Which is a huge, uh, topic that we always talk about on the podcast, right, is

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you really should be thinking about how quickly, cuz it's not good enough to

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

just recover your data anymore, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's how quickly can you recover your data to recover from like a ransomware

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

attack or other things like that.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I would say that you should really, especially look at

W. Curtis Preston:

the backup system and ask yourself, what kind of damage could Curtis, who's

W. Curtis Preston:

running the whole backup system, what kind of damage could Curtis do to us

W. Curtis Preston:

if Curtis got pissed off one afternoon?

W. Curtis Preston:

Now, this isn't about Curtis.

W. Curtis Preston:

This is about what happens if Curtis's account becomes compromised.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's not just a rogue admin, it's also someone

W. Curtis Preston:

masquerading as a rogue admin.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I know that we, uh, at Druva, we added features that, um, that were

W. Curtis Preston:

designed specifically to work around that.

W. Curtis Preston:

Even if someone compromises your account, we still won't let them

W. Curtis Preston:

do the things that they want to do.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um,

W. Curtis Preston:

And,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and, even things like mfa, like we've seen a lot of recent

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

attacks with MFA and other things, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That isn't a fail safe, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So you need to make sure you have all these various layers to handle

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

the risk rather than just putting all your eggs in one basket, be like, Yep,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

that'll protect me cuz it will not.

W. Curtis Preston:

So, uh, the second big category, uh, is

W. Curtis Preston:

hardware and system failure.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna see, see what you think

W. Curtis Preston:

about this cuz you've lived.

W. Curtis Preston:

The other side a little differently than me.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, I'm gonna say, so when I started my career, this was,

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't know, but not equal.

W. Curtis Preston:

But it was a significant, it wasn't equal to the dumb user, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Because we would get, we had 12,000 employees.

W. Curtis Preston:

We would do an average of 10 restores a day.

W. Curtis Preston:

From users calling in.

W. Curtis Preston:

My favorite was a user that called in and said that they needed a file to be

W. Curtis Preston:

restored and it was called resume.Doc.

W. Curtis Preston:

And I'm like, Really?

W. Curtis Preston:

Is that what that file is called?

W. Curtis Preston:

Resume dot doc?

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's really important that I have this restored.

W. Curtis Preston:

Okay.

W. Curtis Preston:

All right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, no, you know, no judgment, but, um,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You're like, Shall I restore it to an alternate location

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

like another, a future employer,

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Try to grok this.

W. Curtis Preston:

Okay.

W. Curtis Preston:

Back then we had servers running on hard drives, and by that I

W. Curtis Preston:

mean individual hard drives.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

The, the most failing thing in the data center, we would have a server running the

W. Curtis Preston:

whole environment, and then the data would be stored on a series of hard drives.

W. Curtis Preston:

There was no raid.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

And so a single, So if you

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Drive failures, which are very, very high.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, well, if you had like 10 drives, you didn't have you.

W. Curtis Preston:

You had 10 single points of failure, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Wasn't just one single point of failure.

W. Curtis Preston:

You had 10 single points of failure.

W. Curtis Preston:

So back then, I think mechanical failure and system failure was a much bigger.

W. Curtis Preston:

Today we have virtualization and we have raid, and we have failover,

W. Curtis Preston:

and we have vMotion and all that

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah,

W. Curtis Preston:

I

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You have erasure coding you have?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

High availability,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

clustering, all the rest,

W. Curtis Preston:

We don't, generally it can happen.

W. Curtis Preston:

We don't generally restore because of that today.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

typically, Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It happens underneath the covers.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Unless it's an application that isn't.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Like a modern application, like a lot of environments still are running older

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

applications that may not be virtualized.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And yes, it could, but

W. Curtis Preston:

But it's probably still stored on disc

W. Curtis Preston:

that's

W. Curtis Preston:

RAIDed

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So the storage side, you might be okay, but maybe the server side

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you might still have issues, Right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That you still have to be concerned about if, assuming it's not virtualized

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

or you can't

W. Curtis Preston:

might go down, but I don't have to reach for my

W. Curtis Preston:

backups if the storage is still okay.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's all I'm saying.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's generally a human being did something stupid.

W. Curtis Preston:

Is the, is the, I, I'm gonna say the most common reason?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

definitely the most common, The only thing I can think of

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

from a hardware failure is there are still cases where you might get silent

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

data, corruption and other aspects.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That you still might need to worry about.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That isn't necessarily human error.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, it's the developer error potentially.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right,

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But that's the only other thing I can think of where you, Yes.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

It's not necessarily that you have to think about the hardware

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

itself failing, but there are still components within it, which might

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

lead to data corruption and affecting.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, it's interesting that you mentioned that.

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm not sure if I brought up, if I brought up, data corruption

W. Curtis Preston:

just happening over time.

W. Curtis Preston:

I, I think I'm gonna count that as system failure, as,

W. Curtis Preston:

as, as a hardware failure, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Because it's the underlying mechanism.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, I don't know if I mentioned that in the hardware failure section or not.

W. Curtis Preston:

Maybe I did, maybe I didn't.

W. Curtis Preston:

But, um,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

There you go.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

For our listeners, it's something that isn't in the book.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

If it's not in there,

W. Curtis Preston:

Well, it may not, may not be in the book.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Having worked in storage for so long, it's one of the things that's always on

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

my mind, even though I think a lot of people don't think about it, cuz there's

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a lot of scrubbing that happens and all the rest that it's not as likely anymore.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

But it's not that it's been eliminated.

W. Curtis Preston:

There, uh, there are those who think that, that, that bit

W. Curtis Preston:

rot is a, is a boogeyman that people like you and me use to scare people.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, those people can go pound sand.

W. Curtis Preston:

So the next we'll talk about again, something that's very current.

W. Curtis Preston:

So I am from Florida, originally from Florida.

W. Curtis Preston:

I live in, I live.

W. Curtis Preston:

Much better weather.

W. Curtis Preston:

Now, down in, in,

W. Curtis Preston:

Sango, it's relative

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

My, my mother does not like the weather here.

W. Curtis Preston:

She thinks it's too cold.

W. Curtis Preston:

The idea of getting cold, you know, cool at night is she's,

W. Curtis Preston:

does not like that at all.

W. Curtis Preston:

I think that's the single greatest feature, possibly of sun ago.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, but I'm speaking of course, of, of natural disasters.

W. Curtis Preston:

So we're recording this as they are.

W. Curtis Preston:

Recovering from the fourth strongest hurricane ever to hit landfall in

W. Curtis Preston:

the us, which is Hurricane Ian.

W. Curtis Preston:

I, you know, it was, it was 150 miles an hour.

W. Curtis Preston:

I've been in worse.

W. Curtis Preston:

I was actually in Houston, and I don't know where Alicia falls, but what

W. Curtis Preston:

I remember was 155 miles an hour.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Hmm.

W. Curtis Preston:

Hurricane force winds with Alicia and I was in Houston.

W. Curtis Preston:

So you're basically right.

W. Curtis Preston:

You're right there on the water.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and.

W. Curtis Preston:

That was a mess.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

I remember I was in, I was, well, I was in Alvin, which, um,

W. Curtis Preston:

shout out to the folks in Alvin.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's a tiny little town that's a suburb of Houston, and my mother and her

W. Curtis Preston:

husband managed an apartment complex.

W. Curtis Preston:

I was a teenager.

W. Curtis Preston:

There wasn't enough plywood to cover the windows on both sides.

W. Curtis Preston:

So I remember that we covered one side based on the direction of the wind, and

W. Curtis Preston:

then when the, when the, uh, eye hit, we took down all the plywood and put

W. Curtis Preston:

it on the other side of the building.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, the, just trying to minimize the, you know, the blast radius

W. Curtis Preston:

as we talk about in it, right.

W. Curtis Preston:

And the thing is, when you, you know, we've got a couple of great episodes about

W. Curtis Preston:

this, about recovering from a natural disaster, um, from, from people that

W. Curtis Preston:

actually participated in it, and maybe we'll get another one here from Florida.

W. Curtis Preston:

But the, the challenges when you look at.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, so I'm looking here at the list that I had in the book.

W. Curtis Preston:

Floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, uh, typhoons and cyclones.

W. Curtis Preston:

Tornadoes and sinkholes.

W. Curtis Preston:

So what's interesting is Florida has all but the earthquakes,

W. Curtis Preston:

so well, it doesn't have.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Typhoons?

W. Curtis Preston:

a typhoon goes the other way.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

That's what it isn't that what the thing was, the typhoon.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and remember we had another name of storm I, I never

W. Curtis Preston:

even heard of until we had the, the Derecho, um, which is a

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Land

W. Curtis Preston:

based hurricane.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You basically get like a, the giant pattern and the high sustained winds, so

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

it basically becomes a land hurricane.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, we, The guy that was on here, I remember him saying

W. Curtis Preston:

that he was just standing on his porch and he's like, I'm sorry, what is that?

W. Curtis Preston:

like just outta nowhere.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah,

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, the, the thing about all of these is that they wipe

W. Curtis Preston:

out everything, you know, look at the photos, look at the videos of

W. Curtis Preston:

what's happened in, um, in Florida.

W. Curtis Preston:

Fort Myers right now is, Um, devastated.

W. Curtis Preston:

I think the worst pictures of videos I remember was Katrina, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Because you had the combination of all of this, plus the fact that New

W. Curtis Preston:

Orleans was essentially underwater.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

They were, they were below sea level, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

And so you see the pictures of Fort Myers, now everything's

W. Curtis Preston:

destroyed, but the water's gone.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right now back with Katrina, it was still, the water was

W. Curtis Preston:

still

W. Curtis Preston:

up.

W. Curtis Preston:

You know, bodies were literally still floating around it.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was horrible.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and it, and it, and it made rescue very difficult cuz it meant everything

W. Curtis Preston:

had to be boats and helicopters.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, but I think that's the number one thing to take away when

W. Curtis Preston:

preparing for a natural disaster.

W. Curtis Preston:

Is that nothing that you're used to counting on.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I assume it's

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

all gone.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

So that was what I think we learned with that.

W. Curtis Preston:

That person there that came on.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, do you remember he, he talked about the internet.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think if I recall, they had an ISP or an msp, and they basically

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

were like our employees needed access, internet access to make sure

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

things were okay in supporting their customers, and they had no internet.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

So I think people drove like an hour and a half, two hours away to like a

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Starbucks, so then they could log in just so they can continue and have

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

access because they needed to keep their business up and running and that

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

was the only way they could keep it.

W. Curtis Preston:

That that's, that's one problem that they had.

W. Curtis Preston:

The other one that they had was that they used LDAP that was headquartered in the US

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

as their authentication system in order to get into the

W. Curtis Preston:

system, in order to do the restore,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Oh, that was, Sorry.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

That was, Yes, that was the, Sorry.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The one I was talking about was the land hurricane one.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

You're right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Oh, oh, right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

a hurricane on a tropical island.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

And the, we, we should put links, I think in the, in the show

W. Curtis Preston:

description to these episodes.

W. Curtis Preston:

That was a really good episode.

W. Curtis Preston:

Like if you wanna know what it's like to actually recover from a

W. Curtis Preston:

hurricane, Cause he talked about that nothing was consistent, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

That, you know, they, they could, they didn't have consistent power,

W. Curtis Preston:

They didn't have consistent internet.

W. Curtis Preston:

They, they ended up getting consistent internet by doing,

W. Curtis Preston:

uh, you know, satellite-based.

W. Curtis Preston:

Internet.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

And they didn't need a lot of bandwidth.

W. Curtis Preston:

They just needed consistency.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, They

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

like food and where to sleep.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think he slept in the office

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

He converted one of the offices into a room and they, he

W. Curtis Preston:

ate a lot of rice and beans

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

weeks.

W. Curtis Preston:

He

W. Curtis Preston:

was there

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

and he, and he said he was lucky, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I think a lot of people didn't have food, didn't have clean water,

W. Curtis Preston:

right.

W. Curtis Preston:

right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Well, you look at what's going on now, I mean, Puerto Rico, you know,

W. Curtis Preston:

we talked about a lot about Florida.

W. Curtis Preston:

Puerto Rico and Cuba are massively hit, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Because they, cuz they're getting hit on both sides at the same time.

W. Curtis Preston:

The place is so small.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Puerto Rico especially because they had already been hit by that

W. Curtis Preston:

other hurricane not that long ago.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and you know, it's, it's funny, um, you know, our friends over there at actual

W. Curtis Preston:

Tech media, Scott Lowe and company, so they're having their 10th anniversary.

W. Curtis Preston:

Congratulations to them, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, they scheduled an offsite for their 10th anniversary in October in

W. Curtis Preston:

Florida, and they're there this week.

W. Curtis Preston:

Right now they're in Central Florida, they're in Orlando.

W. Curtis Preston:

They're fine.

W. Curtis Preston:

But I just, you know, I wish Scott had reached out to me and said, Hey,

W. Curtis Preston:

I'm thinking about doing a thing in Florida, You know, when should I not go?

W. Curtis Preston:

And I would've said, September, October.

W. Curtis Preston:

Don't go.

W. Curtis Preston:

anywhere near,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

W. Curtis Preston:

don't go anywhere

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

Weather's unpredictable.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Speaker:

You never

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's the, it's the, it's the, you know, it's a hurricane season.

W. Curtis Preston:

But yeah, that's the big thing is this, but this is why we back up.

W. Curtis Preston:

A, a, a natural disaster, um, can just wipe out everything

W. Curtis Preston:

in your company, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

It, it wipe out, it wipes out the building, it wipes out the

W. Curtis Preston:

power to get to your building.

W. Curtis Preston:

It wipes out the internet to your building.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and you have to bring all of that back.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

or you don't bring it back in the current location,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

you bring it back somewhere else.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Right.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know we talk a lot about disaster recovery, but even

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

without disaster recovery, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

This is where the 3 21 rule, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

The one part, right, of keeping a copy off site.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Because if your data center gets hit by a hurricane and is

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

completely gone, where is your data?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

At least your data should be offsite.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Someplace far enough away, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Not down the.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Such that you

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

can recover.

W. Curtis Preston:

If you're, in Florida, I don't know where the AWS

W. Curtis Preston:

regions are for the southeast, but I don't know if any of 'em are in Florida

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I

W. Curtis Preston:

But if you're in Florida, you would not have

W. Curtis Preston:

your recovery facility, I would think, anywhere in Florida.

W. Curtis Preston:

And that's what, that's what's beautiful about that cloud, right,

W. Curtis Preston:

is you know, this is why we back up and this is also why we don't store.

W. Curtis Preston:

At least one copy of our data anywhere near Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, the, I, I, I think I flashback again, back to MBNA,

W. Curtis Preston:

and we didn't use Iron Mountain.

W. Curtis Preston:

We used a small,

W. Curtis Preston:

um,

W. Curtis Preston:

media storage company.

W. Curtis Preston:

Huh?

W. Curtis Preston:

What's that?

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah, Man man, Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

We used a small, uh, company that was in Wilmington.

W. Curtis Preston:

The thing that we liked about this company, they were probably cheaper

W. Curtis Preston:

than Iron Mountain, but the thing we liked about this company is that their

W. Curtis Preston:

tapes were stored in what used to be a World War II bomb shelter, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

So we felt that they were like really, really safe, but.

W. Curtis Preston:

. Um, it also meant that anytime there was a hurricane or anything

W. Curtis Preston:

or flood threatening to come up the eastern seaboard, we would call them.

W. Curtis Preston:

We'd say it's time for the thing.

W. Curtis Preston:

And the thing was, they would take all our tapes out of the vault and

W. Curtis Preston:

move them up to the third floor.

W. Curtis Preston:

Much less physically secure, but a lot less susceptible to flooding

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, bomb shelter sounds

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

amazing until you're dealing with water

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, I, I highly doubt that they're still using that company,

W. Curtis Preston:

but, um, anyway, I mean, yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

So these are the reasons, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

What about, you know, we, we, we really didn't mention terrorism,

W. Curtis Preston:

but that's up in the, you know, in the human, the human disasters.

W. Curtis Preston:

That, that that's a real thing.

W. Curtis Preston:

Nowadays, I think you're more susceptible to electronic terrorism

W. Curtis Preston:

than you are a physical terrorism.

W. Curtis Preston:

We can't completely rule that out,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

but I think that, I think that the place to start is you

W. Curtis Preston:

first have to build a DR system that works, that would allow you to recover.

W. Curtis Preston:

Outside of the, you know, make that part of your core design.

W. Curtis Preston:

And then the next would be you need to build a ransomware, you know,

W. Curtis Preston:

electronic attack response system.

W. Curtis Preston:

Because it's, it's the DR piece is, is a subset of that.

W. Curtis Preston:

So, you know, to, to just summarize, I think the whole thing is that there,

W. Curtis Preston:

there are, um, there are just so many things that can happen to your data

W. Curtis Preston:

that is your company's lifeblood.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's why we back up and, and, you know, and I'll borrow a line from Shakespeare.

W. Curtis Preston:

Uh, that I use every once in a while when we're talking about some, we're

W. Curtis Preston:

gonna talk about the, the places that we need to back up, I think next.

W. Curtis Preston:

When I get to arguing with people about whether or not I should back up SaaS,

W. Curtis Preston:

one of the phrases that I, that I, um, That I like to use is there are more

W. Curtis Preston:

things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Right.

W. Curtis Preston:

I think I quoted that.

W. Curtis Preston:

I hope I quoted that well.

W. Curtis Preston:

But basically there are so many ways that your data can get, uh, uh, fubar.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's a, that's a military acronym.

W. Curtis Preston:

You're familiar with that one?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I know that one.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and look it up if you dunno what that means.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and.

W. Curtis Preston:

That's why we back up and that's why, you know, Yeah, I, I I don't know.

W. Curtis Preston:

I don't, I don't suffer the fools that want it, that

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Well, well, and I know back to the basics, right?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We've been talking a lot about in a corporate environment,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

but these same risks also apply to your personal data as well.

W. Curtis Preston:

every single one.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yep.

W. Curtis Preston:

And some more than others.

W. Curtis Preston:

Mechanical failure, much more likely in your laptop.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, less likely today than it was 20 years ago when we were

W. Curtis Preston:

using rotating hard drives.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, and yeah, still possible.

W. Curtis Preston:

I will just say this, the most unreliable piece of equipment on your desk is

W. Curtis Preston:

that mechanical, USB hard drive that you're using as a backup right now.

W. Curtis Preston:

Tell me I'm wrong.

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Tell me I'm wrong.

W. Curtis Preston:

Yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

That, that's why, that's why I'm, I'm much more of a fan of,

W. Curtis Preston:

of, you know, of cloud backup.

W. Curtis Preston:

And by the way, you know, you wouldn't be a Druva customer, because, you

W. Curtis Preston:

know, we don't do the, the consumer thing, but there are so many other

W. Curtis Preston:

things that you do for consumers, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

There are cloud services to backup your important stuff.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, yeah.

W. Curtis Preston:

Anyway, well have we, have, we beat the drum enough

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

I

W. Curtis Preston:

Prasanna?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

And just for our listeners, I think the next topic on

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

back to the basics will be what, Curtis, what are we, where do we go from here?

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

Where do we go from here?

W. Curtis Preston:

Good question.

W. Curtis Preston:

We talk a lot about some techy stuff.

W. Curtis Preston:

One of the things that you hear us say a lot is that you, um, you need to go to

W. Curtis Preston:

the business and you need to get your, um, you know, your service level agreements

W. Curtis Preston:

and things like RTO and RPO . You need to get that from the business, and you

W. Curtis Preston:

need to get the business to buy into this whole thing that you're gonna do,

W. Curtis Preston:

because you can't, you can't be, you.

W. Curtis Preston:

Batman is not a good backup person, right?

W. Curtis Preston:

You can't be alone in the night, uh, with no funding doing a backup system.

W. Curtis Preston:

It's a horrible way to do.

W. Curtis Preston:

You gotta get the backup.

W. Curtis Preston:

You gotta get the, the powers that be as into backup as you are.

W. Curtis Preston:

, Right?

W. Curtis Preston:

Maybe not as, as into backup as Daniel Rosehill.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um,

Prasanna Malaiyandi:

We love you Daniel

W. Curtis Preston:

I love you, Daniel.

W. Curtis Preston:

The backup, anarak, so that's what we're gonna talk about next

W. Curtis Preston:

is how to, how to bring, how to bring the business into this.

W. Curtis Preston:

Um, so good.

W. Curtis Preston:

So thanks for asking me that.

W. Curtis Preston:

It was a good, it's a good follow.

W. Curtis Preston:

All right, and I'll just, again, I'll mention, um, if you're interested in

W. Curtis Preston:

all these topics, you can get a free copy, uh, you know, an ebook copy

W. Curtis Preston:

of my book, latest book, Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com.

W. Curtis Preston:

Druva.com/podcast and, um, uh, download your own copy so you can follow along

W. Curtis Preston:

at Home Kids And, um, remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all