ATR2500x-USB Microphone & Logitech BRIO: This first episode of 2024 is a
validation of all the backup, the basics episodes we've been doing.
Because our most popular episode from 2023 was a basics episode
on what you need to back up.
You can't get much more basic than that.
This episode is a rebroadcast of that, and it's dedicated to what we
now call traditional backup sources, servers, VMs, desktops, laptops,
and of course mobile devices.
We talk about which of them need to be backed up and why along with the
logic that I use when deciding whether or not to back up a particular device.
Enjoy the new year, kick back and enjoy this rebroadcast of our
most popular episode of last year.
For those that don't know me.
W. Curtis Preston: I'm W.
Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
Backup.
And I've been deep in backup for over three decades.
This podcast turns backup admins and to cyber recovery heroes.
This is the backup wrap up.
Welcome to the Backup wrap up.
I'm your host W.
Curtis Preston and I have with me a guy whose only relationship
to the Silicon Valley Bank is that he used to get coffee there.
Uh, Prasanna Malaiyandi how's it going?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Ah, I'm good, Curtis.
Yeah.
Um, I, when all the news broke about Silicon Valley Bank, I was like,
wait, that name sounds so familiar.
I bet I know where they are.
So, In one of my prior employments, uh, we were just down the street from them and in
their headquarter location in Santa Clara.
It's very interesting because in the center of it, there's
like this coffee shop.
And it's a standalone coffee shop and they're only open during some hours.
So some of us would walk down there, have coffee and come back.
And so when I heard the news about Silicon Valley Bank, I'm like,
wait, that sounds very familiar.
I went and like Google mapped it and looked it up and I was
like, wait, I've been there.
I've seen the people walking around in there having coffee.
I probably had coffee with similar people, right?
Some of the employees are Silicon Valley Bank.
So I was like, wow, that's uh,
W. Curtis Preston: maybe you had coffee with the people that
are now standing in line at svb.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah, possibly.
Now I know because, but I'm guessing though, that a lot of their stuff
was either online or over the phone.
Like how often, and here's a question for you.
How often do you actually go to a physical bank?
When was the last time you went to a bank
W. Curtis Preston: well, I don't, but all I see on the news is are
lines of people at svp, you know, and they're going and it's like, and it's
like founder after founder, right?
It's like the c e o and they're like, yeah, I'm trying to get my money out.
You
Prasanna Malaiyandi: which is a little odd in this day and age of digital,
and even the fact that these are probably like startup founders, right?
In tech and they're like, we're gonna go old fashioned and stand in line.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Well, the problem is digital doesn't work, right?
In the current scenario, digital doesn't work.
So you go up and basically your choices are a wire transfer, um,
cashier check, or a giant pile of cash.
Um, I don't, I don't know if the giant pile of cash is actually,
can you, can you imagine that?
Yes, I have a $1 million bill.
I don't think, surely you can't walk out with a giant pile of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I bet you Well, it, I don't think you can walk out
that same day because it depends on how much cash they have on hand.
And I don't know if banks actually keep that much cash on hand.
But if you made such a large withdrawal, I'm sure if you called a
day or two ahead, could you imagine walking out with like $10 million?
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that was kind of a problem.
Uh, or that was the problem in the, in the first place, right?
Is a whole bunch of people.
Asking for their money when, uh, it's funny, I just got, I just got
a notification inside what Inside SVBs collapse that was, that's
the New York Times notification.
I just got, uh, may you live in interesting times, the
old, uh, Chinese, uh, proverb.
So in our continued, uh, backup to basic series, um, we are continuing to work.
Uh, my current favorite book, uh, which is Modern Data Protection, my latest from
O'Reilly, which, um, uh, you know, it, it's my fourth book and, um, we'll see,
we'll see if I got a fifth one in me.
Uh, there, there certainly is a topic floating around that's
been very popular lately.
But, uh, this chapter, what's that?
Yeah, bank collapses.
How not to have it run on the bank.
You know, it's funny, the whole banking system is really built on sort of trust
in that any bank can fail the way SVB did.
If enough people come up and say they all want their money at once, right?
Because every bank invests for the long term and Right.
But, um, but anyway.
I don't wanna talk about svb.
So, um, by the way, we'll throw out our usual disclaimer, uh, Prasanna
and I work for different companies.
He works for Zoom, I work for Druva.
And, uh, this is not a podcast of either company and, um, The, uh,
the opinions that you hear are ours.
So the, and also, please, uh, please rate us, uh, go to your
favorite, uh, pod catcher.
Scroll down to where you can give us stars and, and tell us
how wonderful you think we are.
And, um, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: And if you wanna watch us on video, go to
Backup Central because we do post videos of all the episodes.
So
W. Curtis Preston: that's right on
Prasanna Malaiyandi: if you wanna see our lovely faces,
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, you can actually see what we look like.
Um, and, uh, I wonder if the, my, if, if our viewers or listeners will have
the same reaction with you as my family.
Did you remember when they first saw what you look like?
They were like, he doesn't look like, because they'd heard your
voice so much and then, uh, yeah.
And then they saw you and they're like, oh, he didn't, he, he didn't match up to
what I thought he was gonna look like.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: boo.
W. Curtis Preston: I don't know, may, may, maybe they weren't expecting that beard.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: High expectations.
Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: high expectations.
Uh, but anyway, so this week we're gonna talk about, um, you know, the
book tries to cover all of, basically all the things you need to back up.
All the ways that you can back up all the why's you need to back up and, uh,
and all the wheres, right, so where, where you might want to back up.
And the hows.
Uh, and in the beginning here we're talking about the what's and uh, right
now the chapter is about traditional data sources, some of which we still argue over
whether or not they need to be backed up.
And I will, of
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Mainframes.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I will of course say that I stand firmly on
the ground of back up all the things, so you're not gonna hear it from me.
Uh, there, there will be, there are some, some exceptions that
I discuss in this chapter.
Uh, and we'll talk about 'em.
But the first section, uh, is about physical servers.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: What are those?
Do you think people actually know what physical servers are these days?
W. Curtis Preston: Well there, you know, I, you know, I, I was just on a call
yesterday with a Druva customer, or potential, a Druva, a prospect, and they
were discussing, uh, they had a number of physical servers in their data center,
even though they were mostly virtualized.
So, you know, do you, do you see it, I mean, do you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Well, I'm just wondering as everyone's talking
about cloud and compute list, right, functions running, do people even
know like where, like what a physical server even is anymore, right?
Or is it sort of, and this is probably more like the people currently entering
the workforce more than sort of people who've been in the industry for a while.
Because I'm sure most people haven't physically touched
hardware, you know, in a long time.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Well, it just depends on what, what generation, and by generation I
don't mean people, I mean, Like the generation of, of the company, right?
There are definitely companies like Druva where our entire, you know,
we, we have a lot of compute, right?
And we have a lot of things that we do as a company, right?
Um, you know, with thousands of customers and, and you
know, thousand plus employees.
Uh, obviously we have a need of a lot of stuff, but.
I, I don't know.
I, I think we have a computer, like a server, and I don't know what it does.
I, because I actually saw a server room at some point, but it was just
really small and I don't, actually, don't, I think you know what it is.
I think it's, um, the only thing we have is actually it's lab equipment.
It's, it's stuff, it's stuff pretending to be servers so that we can.
You know, back that stuff up, you know, and demo and stuff like that.
But all our, our whole infrastructure is up in the cloud somewhere.
And I think there's a lot of companies that are like that.
But for those of us that have worked at companies and continue to work
at companies where there's just some servers that, for one reason or another
they don't virtualize them, maybe they're not, um, maybe they're not.
Virtu liable, if I can make up a word.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: either, probably due to either hardware specs or even just
the fact that moving this to the cloud doesn't make sense for this application
because there are too many other dependencies or it's just risk, right?
Every time you're migrating or moving a workload, right?
There is risk involved in Sometimes it's like, Nope, we can't touch
that, or we don't want to touch.
W. Curtis Preston: And speaking of risc, uh, I'll spell it with a c.
Uh, if you're using the risc architecture with a c, uh, you know,
that's the salt, the sun architecture.
I still, I still call it sun.
Um, it would be Oracle now, but you know, if you're using
any of the older unixes, right?
Uh, the IBM still is still, theirs is still going strong.
The, the.
A I X.
Right.
That's still actively developed and released.
HP's kind of dead.
Is Solaris still developed?
I think it is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I think it
W. Curtis Preston: I think it
Prasanna Malaiyandi: well, I, well, and I just go back to the, so my
dad, way back when he used to work at Tandem Computers, I don't know
if you remember that name, but they used to build like nonstop kernels.
And so these super high availability systems used in government agencies,
and those are still kicking around because no one wants to touch them.
No one wants to upgrade them.
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Yeah.
So there's a variety of these, some of which are still in production.
Meaning, meaning production, meaning they're still being made.
Most of them are defunct, uh, but they're still running right.
Uh, with an uptime of.
1700 days or whatever the way Linux used to be.
Uh, there, there's sort of two, there's three different types
of backups I talk about here.
The standard backup, just a file system backup, uh, and then
there's a bare metal backup.
Now you said, you said something on the pre-call, you said
you haven't really seen that
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Not that I've seen that.
I think most folks, at least a newer generation, they don't like.
I've always thought, okay, when.
So speaking personally, right?
So when I had my PC in college, right, what I would do is, okay, I back up my
data and then when it came to sort of the OS and everything else, I literally
would like start from scratch, right?
Every single time, just sort of okay, because for me, right?
I didn't trust like all the programs that were there or
things that might have changed.
So I'm like, I'll just start from a clean slate and I had it down to a science.
Like I would literally reinstall my entire system like once every three months.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Was that a, was that a window system?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, that's, I, I didn't do it every three months, but
when I had Windows, I, I did that a lot.
I did the whole sort of refresh thing.
But when, when you're looking at a more complicated architecture, uh, there
are a lot of reasons to, uh, basically back up the operating system itself.
Right?
And when you're doing that, you're not just backing up.
All the files in the operating system, you're potentially backing up.
Basically the, the blocks that make up the, you know, the boot block
and all of that kind of stuff.
Um, the, there, there's a couple of different ways to do that.
And the idea is that if the hardware itself died, right, um, or you bought
new hardware, if you, if you just bought new hardware, as long as the, the OS was.
Uh, you know, plug and play from a, from a new hardware perspective.
Yeah.
You could just literally restore the old s the old os to the new hardware.
And it would just, it would just run right.
And honestly, it, it worked pretty well.
Um, you know, and there are, there continued to be backup
software products that still.
In that way.
Right.
Um, the, the thing is that it's gone by the wayside because of virtualization.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: The one question I wanted to ask though is I don't think
people understand, just going back to one comment, you made the complexities right.
Can you sort of walk through, and I know sometimes we talk about like bare metal
backups and then I know we'll eventually talk about restores, but it's really
the restore I'm interested in, right?
Without bare metal backups.
Like how complex does restore get and like what are the benefits of doing a bare
metal backup from a restore or recovery
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Well, again, outside of the virtualization world, you basically have two choices.
Well, you have three choices.
You have the one that you described, which really doesn't
work in the data center, right?
You, you, you have to, you have to like reload the os, reload all the
applications, and then do all the configuration that you may have done to.
D o s and all the applications.
Um, you could potentially restore a bunch of files if you were really good at it and
knew exactly what you needed to restore to put all that configuration back in place.
Um, the second, and probably more common was the idea of maintaining an image.
Right, you're gonna maintain a Solaris image and an a I X image
and a, you know, a Linux image.
And then you just, you lay down that image and that image isn't just the
os, it's the OS configured the way you want it configured in your environment.
So you would lay down that image and then you do a handful of
customizations, like host name.
That kind of stuff.
Uh, and then it'd be off and running.
And then the third would be you literally back up all of the bites and
blocks, uh, that, you know, comprise
Prasanna Malaiyandi: a specific machine.
W. Curtis Preston: for each specific machine.
And then what you need is you need to boot a mini root.
Uh, basically you, you know, you need to, cuz you need to restore to a
drive that you're not currently using.
So you boot a mini root.
Um, basically, you know, sometimes different oss work differently,
but like with Windows you could restore really basic.
Uh, mini root, and then you'd boot into that, and then you'd
do the restore of the drive.
Uh, it gets really complicated.
Um, but, but the idea is that, um, and, and it's one of the reasons why I
think that it, it went by the wayside and the fact that virtualization came
out, but, um, it's really complicated.
Um, but, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I don't think I wanna do that ever.
W. Curtis Preston: No.
Yeah, well, um, but you know what, uh, time machine is a bare metal backup,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: right?
Because it puts back everything.
Um, you know, it puts back the whole thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Uh, the other thing I had under physical service B was backing up,
NAS, there was a time, uh, shoutout to Steven Manley Druva's CTO.
There was a time when I was a big fan of N D P, the network.
data management protocol, which was the only way, cuz I didn't like
backing up NAS servers via NFS and S and B, because you're competing for
the U, you're competing with the users for the resources of the machine.
And then within DMP it could deprioritize the backup.
Uh, you know, under the priority of the users.
But, you know, without going into it too much, there, there were, there are a lot
of problems with N DM p, the, the chief of them being that it's platform dependent,
meaning that if you back up a NetApp, that backup only works on a NetApp.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: For some vendors, I would say for some backup
vendors, not all have that limitation.
W. Curtis Preston: I think I'm gonna have to argue with you because the
format comes from the platform.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: So if, if I recall, yes, it does come from the
platform, but there are some products which can reverse engineer and actually
write out to a different target.
W. Curtis Preston: Okay.
All right.
So there are some backup products that that basically extrapolate some
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Very few.
But it can't export out and restore everything back perfectly
because like you said, if one vendor supports some attributes,
cuz each vendor is unique, right?
Another vendor, you may not be able to get that same access.
So it will try, it'll at least get you back your data, but it's
not guaranteed all the metadata associated with it matches or
apples and other things like that.
W. Curtis Preston: So what most people do is they, they mount the
NAS device, uh, to some kind of proxy and they back it up that way.
Um, so, and.
You know, and honestly, especially if you've gone to an incremental
forever approach, uh, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Back in the day when we were doing a, a mixture of full and
incrementals, maybe you're having a bigger impact on the filer.
Um, but, um, all right.
The next we have is virtual servers.
Uh, so the world of virtualization, the likes of.
Hyper V, uh, a H v, kvm, all of these things.
And, uh, I'm gonna wax, uh, historical here.
Back in the day, the only thing we could do was VM level backup.
Basically, you put an agent in the vm, you backed up the vm just like it was a
virtual machine, and it was a horrible, if any of you're still out there doing
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Sorry, can you restate that?
W. Curtis Preston: what
Prasanna Malaiyandi: You said you put an agent in the VM and you back up
W. Curtis Preston: VM as if it were a physical machine.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Oh, sorry.
I thought you said virtual machine.
Sorry.
My bad.
W. Curtis Preston: No.
As if it
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I,
W. Curtis Preston: a physical machine.
Well, maybe at least that's what I thought I said anyway,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: so, um, and, and if you're still doing fulls
and incrementals in VMs, stop.
Right.
It's just, I don't know why anyone would st It was horrible
from a architecture standpoint.
It beat the crap out of the virtualization box.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: did you, did you deal with that anywhere where you worked?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
I did.
So one of my former employers, uh, was very big on VMware
W. Curtis Preston: Mm-hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: so, um, yeah.
Luckily, they were smart enough to not do that, right?
To do sort of throw an agent into a VM and back it up like a physical server.
And so at least when I joined, I wasn't there as part of the initial wave towards
figuring out how to back up VMware.
By the time I was there, they were already doing smarter things, which you'll talk
about in a second for backing up VMs because yeah, whenever I thought about
it, I'm like, why would you ever back it up like a normal physical server?
That makes no
W. Curtis Preston: because back then we had, we, well, we had no choice, right?
Um, virtualization broke back up overnight, uh, and we
Prasanna Malaiyandi: you like to talk about that's like, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Uh, the, you know, we had to do things like spread the fulls out across the
month, spread the, in the cumulative incrementals out across the week, and
then do a nightly incremental, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: because just going back to the, what you were
talking about of sort of like the NAS and the N D M P case, right?
With VMware it's a lot worse because if you're backing up one vm, you
could potentially impact all of the other virtual machines running
on that same ESX host, right?
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
If you, if you don't spread the load out, because the full backup is quite, is
quite a, a, a knock on a, on a vm, right?
So if you're, if you're doing a bunch of full backups at the same time on
the same physical server, you're, you know, it's not gonna be good.
Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: It's gonna be a little traffic jam.
Um, and then, um, we started getting this, like, this idea of specialized
backups for hypervisors, right?
So that you could back up at the hypervisor level, right at the VMware
level, at the, you know, hyper V level and you could back up the, the VMs as files.
Um, there is one crucial.
Piece of technology that is required for that to work with Windows.
Do you know what that techno piece of technology would be?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: VSS.
W. Curtis Preston: Yes.
Vss.
So that is Windows Volume Shadow Services.
You want to talk about that?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah, so think of it like Microsoft's
snapshotting technology, right?
Which it pretty much is.
It's just not the normal way that you would think about
designing snapshots, right?
Um, in how once you take a snapshot, Data sort of gets split differently and
merging 'em back together is a little odd.
It's not like what you would think when you think about like hardware snapshots.
And so there are a lot of implications with using vss snapshots.
I would say the one that I commonly ran across was when they designed the VSS
protocol, you basically had to complete a snapshot within a certain amount of.
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: depending on the system, right, because depending
on also like how many layers, if it was a software snapshot or a
hardware based snapshot, right?
It could take more than that amount of time, which means that your snapshots
start failing and as backup, right?
You want to take a snapshot first, so you have a stable point in
time before you do your backup.
You now started to get backup failures, which were painful.
W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.
Yeah, they were, uh, but basically what, what it allowed us to do in
the, in the, the thing about vss is that it could be, it, it had APIs
so that you could call those APIs.
And so VMware and Hyper B and these other virtualization products, they
could call that API and say, Hey, make a snapshot, and then we're
gonna back up that snapshot, right?
So you can back up the, the VM externally.
And, um, uh, while still getting a stable, consistent image, uh,
that was the whole point of v s s.
Is coffee gonna be okay?
I'm very concerned for
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Sorry.
Okay, come here.
Okay.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Okay, come.
Come
W. Curtis Preston: There you go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: now.
He's fine.
W. Curtis Preston: I, I could hear him down there.
I was like, poor, please get poor coffee.
Um, he sounded so sad.
Uh, but yeah, that, so that's basically, you know, if you're
backing up virtualization, you know, or or virtualized servers,
you need to back them up in the way.
That platform likes.
Right?
Exactly.
Right.
Um, and you need, you still, I think you need to be doing incremental,
forever approaches, deduplication approaches so that you minimize the
impact on the physical server that's hosting all that, uh, all those VMs.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I have a question for
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, sure.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Was V s s the first time you've heard of a vendor
enabling backups to be better?
I know we talked about N D M P, but from like a operating system
software side of the house.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, certainly.
Um, well, no, cuz I've been around a while.
The,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I, that's why I was asking.
W. Curtis Preston: the oddly the, the one that actually jumps out at me.
Was, makes this B from a i X.
What makes this B was we'd go back to bare metal backup makes
B was time machine for ax, right?
So it was a, a complete backup of the operating system and everything on it.
To a tape, which if you had the tape driving the tape and you had
a completely brand new server you could restore, that makes the speed
directly to the OS and restore it.
Yeah, I, I can think of that.
I can think of that.
Um, but this was the one, this was one that was, This was useful for
a lot of other purposes, right.
For orchestration.
Uh, and it also works with applications because not only does
it take a snapshot of the operating system, it takes a snapshot of any
VSS compliant, uh, applications.
Right.
See, obviously all of the Microsoft apps, but Oracle as VSS compliant
as well, uh, and other, uh, databases that might run on Windows.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: which is what you want because you want those
applications to be consistent when you
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Exactly, exactly.
Otherwise, you're backing up a file that's changing as you're
backing it up and that's no good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: So the next we have is desktops and laptops.
Um, and this is, this is what I was referring to earlier when I was saying
that we're gonna argue over whether or not you and I, but you know, whether
or not these need to be backed up.
Um, and I, I come down strongly on the back up, all the things.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: Um, what do you, what, what have you run into?
People talking about backing up their laptops out there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I, I have, I think, What you end up seeing is a lot of people
are like, why would I need to back it up?
Especially when you're using all these SaaS services like Microsoft
365 Google Workspaces, right?
How much, and I get the point because it's like how much data actually
sits on your laptop these days?
However, there are scenarios like you're offline for some reason.
Like right now in California, we just got hit with an atmospheric river.
There's a bunch of power outage.
In the area, right?
Which means no internet connectivity.
If you have to work or if you're doing offline editing, that's great, but that
data's sitting on your laptop, right?
And so if that's important, you need to make sure you back it up, right?
One of the things, you go back to Curtis, it's like, if it's
important to you, back it up.
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Yeah.
The.
The funny thing is that, um, well, yeah, so that's really what comes down to is
do you ever create data on your laptop that only sits on your laptop, or, and
by the way, um, the next thing we're gonna talk about is mobile devices.
Um, And if you do so I do.
Right?
I make this podcast, um, and, uh, and I write.
So, um, I, um, there is, although, and I write by voice, uh, you know, dictation.
So for a brief period of time, all of the words of a particular chapter are.
On, not just my laptop.
It's funny, my laptop here, over to my right here is my Windows laptop that
I use just for voice dictation because Dragon, uh, for some reason decided to
give up the, uh, the Macintosh market.
Um, but I've never, I haven't said the full word Macintosh at all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Macin
W. Curtis Preston: I dunno why I said that.
Um, but, um, yeah, so for, for a brief period of time, Any
given chapter is sitting only on that device, and it would suck.
If I lost that chapter right, um, there are people who create, and, and I,
and when I'm producing these podcasts right as I'm producing the podcast,
various pieces of that podcast exist only on this laptop I don't use.
So interestingly enough, interestingly enough, I now use.
A sassy, it's not fully sass, but it is a sa now that I'm thinking about it, the
script, which is the tool that I used to edit my podcast, which I love, right?
I really do.
Um, but the way it works is that as soon as you load files, as soon as you load
the source files into script, they're immediately uploaded to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: on a local copy.
Um, but it, but it's, it's immediately synchronizing, uh, the, the both
the source files as well as all of your edits to the cloud so that,
um, uh, and then it's, um, and it's maintaining a cache of that locally.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: Um, and so it's, it's kind of sassy.
Um, but that's
Prasanna Malaiyandi: but the
W. Curtis Preston: like if you have, if you have a product like that,
then maybe, maybe you don't have to.
If that's the only thing you have, you might not have to back up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: but the question is, do they back up the stuff on their side?
W. Curtis Preston: That is a really good question, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: questions about SaaS.
Right.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, so, um, Which is why I do what I do, which is like I have a local copy of all
of the pieces that go into the podcast.
Um, I don't have, because I don't have a copy of
Prasanna Malaiyandi: you also have the raw too,
W. Curtis Preston: I have the
Prasanna Malaiyandi: you also have the raw stuffers.
W. Curtis Preston: have the raw stuff.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: a long time to recover if you had to do that.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I would have to kind of re-edit
an episode if I had to do that.
Um, but, um, well, it, so first off, a number of things
would have to happen, right?
So the, the, the SaaS service would have to go down
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Your laptop
W. Curtis Preston: I would need to edit a past.
Which I almost have never done, right?
If I do, it happens within a day or two.
It happened this week, oddly enough, uh, because I was editing, I was editing
late at night and I messed up the intro.
For those of you that are listeners, you heard a weird intro.
You're, the music didn't match.
It was a weird, uh, I figured that out as I was listening to it later
and I was like, oh, I gotta fix it.
So I had to go back and re-edit the, the podcast, but that
was five minutes worth of.
Monday
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Because I was already there.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, and then I fixed it.
Yeah.
So, but I'm not going back and editing a podcast from two months ago.
But anyway, this is, this is definitely an edge case, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi: yeah.
Well, and I know you're talking about podcasts, but the other
thing, like I think a lot of people have is like they're pictures.
Like I have, I take pictures where I used to take pictures, right?
And I don't use any SaaS service for editing, right?
I don't use Lightroom in the cloud or iCloud photos or whatever else, right?
I do everything on my laptop, and so those pictures I never wanna lose.
So I back that stuff up four times.
I'm a little crazy, but I have four copies sitting in various places.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, uh, uh, we'll get to mobile devices next.
Um, let me, but let me give, let me give a scenario of one of where I said
in the book where I said, okay, I'm gonna concede the point on this one.
And that is, um, Chromebooks.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston: Chromebooks are nothing more than a cache for what's in Google.
Right?
Um, and so there's nothing that should ever be on the Chromebook
other than just the late most recent synchronized changes, right?
Uh, I, I, you know, you can use it offline and then synchronized changes,
but honestly, if you were offline, you wouldn't be able to back it up anyway.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I would say that listeners should wait till we get to the
chapter on SaaS services, where we talk about what you need to do on that site.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, definitely,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: So it's not that you, it eliminates the
need to worry about backups.
Right.
It's just you don't need to back up your desktop.
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Exactly.
Um, and then we talk about mobile devices.
This one, uh, you know, and I'm, I'm gonna say that I.
I am not compliant, uh, in this regard because I am trusting iCloud photos,
and this is one of those things where I really have to look into this
and I need to see if there we can come up with a solution for this.
Because the beauty of the way the iPhone works and the way iCloud photos is that
iCloud maintains the high res copy.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: master.
W. Curtis Preston: Right, and then on my phone is like the low res copy,
and I only get the high res copy if I like actually start using a photo.
I get it automatically, but there's no way that I can find yet, um, to,
to get all of those high res photos out easily and store them someplace.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Can.
Hmm.
Interesting.
W. Curtis Preston: Um, but, but, but this, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna
submit this as a, as a thing where I'm not doing the right thing.
Okay?
Um, and I am trusting Apple far too much now.
I am paying for them.
I am paying for them to store this data.
So, you know, but the data, the photos that matter to me are only in one place.
So
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Bad Curtis.
Bad.
W. Curtis Preston: right.
The high res versions of these photos are only, and videos are only in one place.
Mainly it would be the really cool videos of my granddaughter,
Lily, that I would miss.
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
But still, you should figure out how to at least pull that data down
to a laptop, so then you can then
W. Curtis Preston: I, I've, I've looked into it.
I, I, I've looked into it and I, I don't wanna spend too much time
talking about here, but I've looked into it before and, and, and I think
then I got busy with other things.
Um, but, uh, And, and I really do need to come up with it, with a solution, and
I need to bring, um, need to bring our friend, uh, Daniel on, uh, for that one.
But, um, but the, the, the point that I want to make is that iCloud photos being
an exception here, if your device that you're holding is, is basically one of
two copies, um, You know, you that, that basically the cloud maintains a backup
copy of your phone and you maintain a copy of your phone and the, and the
cloud has the ability to, here's a big, here's a big if, if the cloud I, if you
go into your phone and you basically delete all your photos, is there any
way to get those back on the cloud?
Um, cuz that's mainly what we're talking about, right?
It's photos.
Um, in your email, you're basically, you're just a cash of the, um, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I think messages work the same way as well.
Lisa, if you're using iMessage.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah, yeah.
Well, and the other, yeah, the other thing, well, yeah.
Um, It, it, it gets, it gets more complicated when we start talking
about consumer personal devices.
If, if you're, if you're a, a, uh, a commercial user, you can,
there, there are services, Druva backs up, uh, mobile devices.
It backs up the iPhone, right?
Um, but we can only back up, and by we, I mean any vendors that do this, we can only
back up what the OS vendor allows us to.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: Uh, which on the iPhone means pretty much only Apple
Prasanna Malaiyandi: a whole lot.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Like, like, um, like if there was a des on the iPhone, is
there a script on the iPhone?
I dunno if there was a script on the iPhone, like I couldn't back
up its data because that's just the way, it's a security feature.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
And even WhatsApp is the same, right?
You have to use WhatsApp's Cloud backup where it'll sync the data to some data
source you get, you tell it to, but you can't use it through a centralized place
to backup everything on your iPhone.
W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.
Exactly,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Although, I do wonder what happens when you do a physical
backup using a lightning cable in iTunes?
W. Curtis Preston: Are you talking Are, are you back to photos?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: No, no, no.
Just in general.
Right?
So I can load iTunes, right?
I could say backup my phone.
I think it does capture all that data though, so
W. Curtis Preston: does.
It doesn't solve my photo problem though,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: No, it doesn't solve well.
W. Curtis Preston: because my phone doesn't have the, the high res copies.
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: I wi here's what I wish, I wish there was a cloud service
that I could pay that would be able to export my high res photos out of, uh, I.
And just back it up.
I pay for that service, but they don't make it available.
They don't make those, um, the high res copies.
I think I can sync them to my laptop, but then I need, I need a lot of storage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: I have, I have no idea how many terabytes
of photos I have up in iCloud.
Um, I know for a fact that I would need a separate drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: but, but basically, so regarding mobile
devices, my opinion is the same.
If you're creating data on these devices that is important to you, and it's only
on that device or only in the cloud, uh, you should back up that data.
And yes, I, I know, I know I need to listen to my own, my own
advice regarding the, the photos.
Um, But if this is corporate data, uh, you get, you get no, you get no grace.
Uh, right.
Um, I can think of, I worked with an engineering company in St.
Louis, um, and, uh, they, they basically, they would send
people out into the field with.
iPads and they would take pictures of jobs.
Those, you know, those were photos that needed to be backed up.
Those were corporate data that existed only in those tablets
and only in those accounts.
Right.
Um, so you would have to, anyway, I, I don't want to, I don't want to, but
my point is, if it's data that's being created and is, it exists only in
one place, it needs to be backed up.
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: And it's important to you?
W. Curtis Preston: And it's important to you, right?
If it's data that doesn't matter.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: I just dunno what that data
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Don't back it up.
Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: Is there data that doesn't matter?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Well, I was thinking.
Like if you didn't care about like random pictures you're taking or if
you're taking, say, a picture of a document just for convenience sake,
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, yeah,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: to someone.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
If you're only using it to send the, you know, you take the picture and then you
send it to the other person and they're the recipient of the picture, then
that document doesn't matter anymore.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: yeah.
Uh, there is this concept, by the way that I mentioned in here of
mobile device management, which you really should think about.
So if you're, so it's very common as I do, it's very common to use your.
Cell phone at work.
Right.
It's very common for companies not to buy, uh, mobile phones anymore.
Right.
But if, um, if you are concerned about the security implications of that, that's what
mobile device management is for, right?
You c
Prasanna Malaiyandi: And it's corporate data, right?
You wanna make sure that if something happens to the phone, like it's
lost or whatever else, you could protect your corporate data and
remote wipe the device, et cetera.
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly.
Exactly.
Uh, and it also, it also creates like a, like almost, I don't know, it's like
a virtu, it's like a vpc, you know?
Uh, inside the phone, A sandbox.
That's a better, that's a better term.
Creates a sandbox in the phone where you can put corporate apps.
Uh, yeah, exactly.
Uh, and you can make your own rules.
Um, Back up, all the things.
Um, I'm gonna pull, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the last page in the chapter
cuz I've, I've got final thoughts in the chapter and I wonder what I said.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I think it is really, and here's the thing.
I know we talked about if it's important, back it up.
I think the flip side is if you don't know what data is important
or not, back up everything.
W. Curtis Preston: Exactly
Prasanna Malaiyandi: safe than sorry.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
What I, what I did mention here is that some companies are adopting
a sync and share tool as their backup method for their laptops.
And I did mention in the, in the, um, in the chapter that,
that that was a bad idea.
Um, if it's corporate data and I can, basically, the problem with
sync and share is if I delete it on my laptop, I delete it in the cloud.
Um, if, if you've got a solution for that particular problem, a good
solution to be able to restore that customer's account, that user's
account, and my laptop, back to the way it looked before something happened.
Because now what we're talking about is things like ransomware, right?
Sync and share is a great way to put ransomware in the cloud, right?
Um, you know, encrypt all those stuff on your, on your desktop and then
your encrypt, and then it's just gonna synchronize it up, up to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Now, here's a question.
I know we'll probably talk about it in the SaaS chapter, but for that sync and
share solution, if they were taking copies of those, the data that existed in the
cloud backups of the data that existed in the cloud, would that change your mind?
W. Curtis Preston: Um, if you could, yeah, I, I think in general.
In general, yes.
Right.
But in general, what I'm finding is that's not the point.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
No, yeah, exactly.
No one's really doing
W. Curtis Preston: they're saying, they're saying, well, we're
trying to save money, right?
And so we're not gonna back up laptops.
We're just gonna use OneDrive.
Well, you're backing up OneDrive, right?
Well, no, because it's Microsoft and it's a SaaS service.
You're wrong.
You're just plain wrong.
Right?
Just Google the Microsoft.
Shared responsibility model.
Read the page, the information and data, your responsibility, not theirs.
It's plain as day on their website.
So stop telling me that you don't need to back up.
Uh, OneDrive.
Um, but um, yeah, so, so yeah.
So, so to go back to your question though, if you're backing up, Um, you
know, the cloud that you're syncing to, to something else, then, you know,
maybe I would withdraw my objection.
Um, well, I, I withdraw my objection.
I just, it's maybe I might have a different objection.
Right.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: but, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: it's just how it's being implemented would be the question.
W. Curtis Preston: Right, right.
Um, would we get all the data?
Obviously there's a potential of data loss there depending on how well the
synchronization is happening because here's my problem with OneDrive,
specifically OneDrive, is that there are no global controls over how
synchronization works or if it works.
So there's no, there's no console that says all of my users are sync.
That's, to me as a, as a practitioner, that's terrifying.
Right.
And so this goes back to your question.
So it, you're still relying on the synchronization process of OneDrive,
which for the record can be de can be deactivated by any user at any time.
And not only can it be deactivated, and I've heard that you can deactivate
that ability, if I've heard you can turn on off that ability.
They just have to like, not connect to the internet.
They could connect to the internet for a long time or not connect to 365, right?
Or whatever.
Um, the, the, the fact that there's no global view for me to see that everybody
is syncing and then for me to notice, oh, Prasanna hasn't synced in a week.
What's, what's, what's going on?
Prasanna?
And you're like, oh, well my network card died.
Oh, well perhaps we should get you a new network
Prasanna Malaiyandi: fix that.
Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, my, my home internet went out because I live in
the Bay Area and we've been having background, little, little, little bit
of a rain up there and down here as well.
It was raining quite a bit this morning.
How's the weather right
Prasanna Malaiyandi: more than the rain was, it's nice and sunny.
Or it was sunny.
Now it's overcast, but no rain until next week.
But yeah, I think it was a 50 mile per hour gusts yesterday
that sort of did a lot of things or brought a lot of things down.
So,
W. Curtis Preston: Speaking of the 50 mile per hour gust, uh, I believe that you
solved our blueberry, uh, mystery as well.
Um, remember I was saying that I had these blueberry
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Oh, yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: over my, all over both cars and all over the driveway.
Uh, we looked, and they're not actual blueberries, but they're blueberries.
They're not blueberries.
Uh, but yeah, the neighbor, the neighbor house over has a tree.
With little blueberries in it.
And so it must have been the gusts, all the gusts that we had, they must have
just been blown over and we just were the unfortunate recipients of all of those.
They just went everywhere.
And it was like, what?
At first we thought they were birds, right?
But it was like, man did an entire flock of birds at eight
berries just fly over our house.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Uh, Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston: Absolutely.
All right, well thanks, uh, thanks again, Prasanna for chatting
about our favorite subject.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Thank you for educating me on or enlighten
me on bare metal restores.
See, I learn something
W. Curtis Preston: back in the day, um, yeah, we used to do, I used
to do, do you remember ZIP drives?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, so I used to do a bare metal backup of my Linux laptop,
and we could do it with windows too, uh, of, of the, of an Intel based laptop.
Uh, with zip drive, basically you would, you would boot, you would boot.
You needed a floppy, you needed a floppy, you would boot, you had a mini route
that was on the floppy, like Tom's, Archie, bt, you remember that one.
Um, you would boot, you would put that on the floppy.
You'd boot to.
The zip drive would have, you could read the zip drive, uh,
and you would actually use dd.
You would use DD to, to, which
Prasanna Malaiyandi: bring the data
W. Curtis Preston: I don't know what Didi stood for.
Direct disk.
I don't know.
Uh, it was a Unix command and you could do it.
Basically it was a block to block copy of the drive and you
created a file on the zip drive.
And that's how I used to do Bemo on my laptops back in
the day, uh, back in the day.
ATR2500x-USB Microphone & Logitech BRIO-1: Thanks for joining us for this rebroadcast
of a classic episode from last year.
I hope you have a great year.
That's a wrap.