Magnetic devices make mistakes; the only question is how many mistakes will they make. I was presenting a slide a while ago that listed the Bit Error Rates (BERs) for various magnetic media, and someone decided to take issue with it. He basically claimed that it was all bunk and that modern-day magnetic devices don’t…
It seems to me that source dedupe is the most efficient way to backup data, so why is it that very few products do it? This is what I found myself thinking about today. Source dedupe is the way to go This is my opinion and always has been. Ever since I first learned about…
The answer is absolutely yes, and anyone who thinks you don’t need to do so should not be put in charge of your data. Also, anyone who thinks I’m saying this just because I work for a company that backs up Office365 should read this blog post from seven years ago when I basically said…
Disaster recovery experts do not agree whether you should have one-and-only-one recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) for each application, or two of them. What am I talking about? Let me explain. In case you’re not familiar with RTO & RPO, I’ll define them. RTO is the amount of time it should…
One of the most valuable resources your company has it probably not being backed up properly – if at all. Like a lot of cloud services, the ability of salesforce customers to recover from big mistakes or a malicious attack is a bit overstated. Let’s take a look at that. Big, bad update Say, for…
No one knows for sure whether backups are going to be included in the right to be forgotten (RTBF). Even the GDPR ICO isn’t being entirely clear about it yet. But that hasn’t stopped people from expressing very strong opinions on the subject. I’ve now written several articles on this topic, and I’ve seen a…
In my continuing series of challenges with backup with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I thought I’d look at snapshots, and the unique problem they present. They may be even more problematic than traditional backups. Note: This article is one in a series about GDPR. Here’s a list of articles so far: Worried about…
I’m doubling down on my opinion that the GDPR is not going to be able to force companies to “forget” people in their backups – especially personal data found inside an RDBMS or spreadsheet. Let me explain. Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. I’m a data protection expert, not a legal expert. I’ve read the GDPR…
I’m still just thinking out loud here. Again… not an attorney. I have read the GDPR and done some analysis of it, primarily around the right to be forgotten (RTBF) and how it pertains to data protection systems. I just want to start the conversation about some of these topics and see what people are…
I am not a lawyer. I’m not even what I consider a GDPR specialist. But I’ve read a lot of the text of the GDPR, and I’ve read a lot about it and watched a lot of videos. So I’d like to offer my layman’s interpretation of an important aspect of GDPR – the right…