I keep running into a particular problem at customers and I’m curious if any backup software products have addressed it. Do any backup products load-balance their use of tape drives across multiple Fibre Channel ports? Click Read more to see more details. Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O’Reilly author, and host of The…
A CNET review of Mozy's online backup software, entitled "Everyone likes Mozy, Except Me." makes one or two good points, but IMHO misses the boat and makes no sense to me, a backup person. If you want to know what he said and why I disagree with it, read on. Written by W. Curtis Preston…
BackupCentral moved to a new server today. That was fun! Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O’Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at S2|DATA, which helps companies manage their legacy data
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….
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…
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…
Some of you may read this title and say, “No duh!” but I think it’s worth talking about. From email to pictures to storage, if you’re storing your data on somebody else’s servers, it probably isn’t getting backed up. Let’s talk about that. Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O’Reilly author, and host of…
I've received a lot of questions about the different tape drives are doing encryption, so I thought I'd get some details and get back to you. This is the first of a few posts on this topic, and it concentrates on Sun's T10000 tape drive. There will also be a post on IBM's TS1120 and…
Did you know that over 8 billion dollars in gift cards will go unused this year? They get lost; you forgot you had them; you don't have them when you need them; you get the idea. Don't let that happen to you by backing up your gift cards. Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time…
After hanging up on the 50th phone call where I recommend personal computer stuff to friends and family, I figured I’d do the same for my backupcentral friends. This blog entry will highlight what I think you should do at home to ensure a nice smooth computing experience — and yes — to make sure…