Instant recovery is the modern-day equivalent of what we used to call a hot site, as it allows you to recover immediately after some type of incident. I have personally advocated for this concept, as I strongly believe that in a true disaster (or ransomware event), time is of the essence. As mentioned in my…
You don’t negotiate with terrorists, and you don’t pay ransom unless you have no other choice. Even then, you should try every available avenue before you decide to pay money to the company holding your data for ransom. It’s just a bad idea. Last week there was a news story of a company that paid…
Your backup server might be the biggest vulnerability in your datacenter, as I already discussed in my previous blog post. Which means that you should have patched it first, but I’m betting that you haven’t patched it yet. If you don’t know why I feel this is a problem, go check out the previous post….
Did you know there have been 7870 public data breaches since 2005? Your company’s data is under attack. Like terrorism, the attackers only have to be successful once. You have to be successful 100% of the time. Which is why its important to patch your systems regularly and keep abreast of any security vulnerabilities your…
On my LinkedIn profile, I posted a link to my last article, Why good dedupe is important — and hard to do. I got some pretty good feedback on it, but one comment from my buddy Chris M. Evens (@chrismevans) got me thinking. “Curtis, it’s worth highlighting that space optimisation may not be your only…
Good dedupe creates real savings in disk and bandwidth requirements. It also makes the impossible possible by replicating even full backups offsite. Dedupe is behind many advancements in backup and replication technology over the last decade or so. What is dedupe? Dedupe is the practice of identifying and eliminating duplicate data. It’s most common in backup…
I’ve never seen an appliance solution that I would call “pay as you go.” I might call it “pay as you grow,” but never “pay as you go.” There is a distinct difference between the two. What is “pay as you go?” I’ll give you a perfect example. BackupCentral.com runs on a Cpanel-based VM. Cpanel…
Getting enough bandwidth is the second challenge of designing and maintaining a traditional backup system. Tape is the first challenge, which is solved by not using it for operational backups. The next challenge, however, is getting enough bandwidth to get the job done. This is a major problem with any backup software product that does…
We’ve come a long way, baby. I worked at Amazon when they were just an Internet bookseller. I put in the first enterprise-wide backup system back in 1998. I was there on the day they came out with the “universal product locator,” which is the day they sold something other than books. Oh, and if…
Specifically, this article is about why modern tape drives are a really bad choice to store the initial copy of your backups. It’s been this way for a long time, and I’ve been saying so for at least 10 years, in case anyone thinks I’ve been swayed by my current employer. Tape is good at…