W. Curtis Preston: hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast.
I'm your host w Curtis Preston, aka Mr.
Backup, and have with me a guy that just like five minutes
ago, compared me to a Luddite.
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.
Right, which was you were.
Very used to a certain way of operating a, a piece of software,
right, for the workflow.
And that software completely updated, but not everything was there.
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.
I'm
W. Curtis Preston: but I'm not, I'm not averse to technology or to new technology.
I like things to get better, but it does, It is difficult when you're
using a piece of software and then they're like, You know what?
We had to just rip and replace.
Like in order to get, in order to be where we wanted to be, we had to throw
out the baby with the bath water.
We had to, you know, you're gonna love what we have.
Once you get used to it, I hope you hope you don't mind throwing away everything
you've known after all this time.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: You know what this reminds me of?
Every time someone updates a backup software app, like completely changes it
or pushes you, and everyone's like, No.
I remember, uh, at the old place I used to work that there was, I can't
remember what version of the backup software it was, but one version,
they decided to change the color,
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: right, the color of the background, like what their standard
colors were and everyone complained.
And they basically had to undo it because they were like, We don't
understand what these colors are.
We don't like them.
Go back to the way they were before.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, I don't think my concern was that petty.
I'm just saying, but I'm just saying when the buttons that I used to press no longer
work, you know, um, I'm just saying, I just, I just wanna edit my video.
That's
Prasanna Malaiyandi: But, but, but this is also kind of the.
Upside and downside of SaaS is things run really fast.
You get great new features, but because you're building so quickly, not everything
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.
I don't know if you've figured that out yet or not.
I'm not good at delayed gratification.
But, uh, so, uh, speaking of places that you used to work, I'll
throw out our usual disclaimer.
Prasanna works for Zoom.
I work for Druva Now.
This is not a podcast of either company and the opinions that you hear are ours.
And, uh, one of which is apparently a Luddite.
Um, and if you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: True opinion.
It's
W. Curtis Preston: we would love for you to rate us.
Uh, please rate us by going to your favorite podcatcher.
Scroll down to where you give us the stars and give us a comment.
We love the comments.
It's great to hear from people.
Um, and, uh, I really love when you reach out to me on LinkedIn.
That's also great.
If you wanna join the conversation, be on the podcast, just reach out to me at WC
preston on Twitter or w Curtis Preston,
@gmail: and, uh, we'll get you on.
And, um, so I wanna continue and, and, and almost continue
sort of go back to square one.
We talked about doing a back to the basics series and for some
reason we started the back.
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.
And so I thought that a perfect place to go to, to look at the basics of
backup would be this lovely book.
Which I believe you helped, uh, edit sir.
Uh, Modern Data Protection from O'Reilly and Associates, and, um,
available at a bookstore near you.
You can get an ebook version of this by going to druva.com/podcast
and, um, you know, free of charge.
In the beginning of this book, we have the, you know, what some might consider
a fluff chapter, which is why we back up.
And I, I thought there's no more basic question to answer.
Then why do we do all of this?
And I, I start the book with a story, which I know I've alluded to
a couple of times on the podcast.
I may have even told the whole version, but, hey, we're
starting from scratch here.
So I'm gonna tell this version.
And this is basically how I got into backup.
I was al, I was already in backup, but this is how I really got into it.
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
listeners really know, like, what
W. Curtis Preston: How did I,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: you do before you became Mr.
Backup?
Before you got into backup?
Like, like where, Like how did you go from whatever it was
you were doing into backup?
W. Curtis Preston: Hmm.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I don't think a lot of people know
that, and it's very different.
W. Curtis Preston: Well, in, um, January of 1993, I got out of
the US Navy and I was looking for work in the computer business.
I had zero experience in computers.
I had taken, I don't, I don't know if you're, if, do you remember
the National Radio Institute?
Do you remember that they, they had the ads back in, back in Popular Science.
They had an ad like, Build your own
Prasanna Malaiyandi: computer
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: build your own computer.
I did that while I was out to see, I took this correspondence course.
This is pre-internet, right?
Um, you got, you got a, like a book and you worked through that book and
it was like q and a and then, you know, and then once you got all done,
then you built a computer and it was an 8088 for those of you I remember.
So I built my own computer and that was literally the extent of
my computer experience, right?
And I got outta the Navy and I managed to get a job at a company called Digital
Systems, which was a, um, a company that it put in, um, it was called Intelligent.
Blended call management systems.
You might call it an auto dialer.
Um, auto
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Robo caller.
W. Curtis Preston: was a naughty word or a robo caller.
Yeah, that was a naughty word.
That was sort of the dumb machine that didn't have the
intelligence that ours had.
But anyway, that's what, that was the very first job, but only like,
Three or four months later, I secured a job via a great connection.
That would be my wife, um, at what at that time was the second largest credit
card company, and that would be mbna.
And, um, I got the job of the backup guy and um, I was in charge of the
backups for our entire data center, which at that time was 15 servers.
Um, they were DEC.
We also had the first computer designed for Unix, AT&T SV 3B2.
And, um, Uh, and I started with little tiny with, uh, little tiny,
uh, cartridges and tapes and whatnot.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: how big was the environment?
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
when I joined it was probably the whole data center was 50 gigabytes.
because it was literally like 11 servers.
In fact, it was probably smaller than that because our biggest server
I remember was five gigabytes.
It was huge.
It was five gigabytes and it took us all weekend to get a full backup of it.
Um, And, uh, and the other servers were much smaller than that, so
it was probably, maybe even 30 gigabytes as the whole data center.
But by the time I left, it was much larger.
It was like 300 gigabytes
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: and 100 of those 300 gigabytes was a single server.
It was a, it was an HP T 500.
It had a hundred gigabytes.
And I was like, How in the hell am I ever gonna back all this up?
Um, because it had a, it had a four gigabyte tape drive and I was like,
so, Are you gonna give me an FTE to stand here and swap tapes all night?
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
been the backup person for a few months and we lost our purchasing database.
It was an Oracle database.
Uh, the name of the server was Paris.
It had been recently migrated.
It had only been on Paris.
I don't know, like a month or two, a couple of months.
And the roughly, slightly less time than how long I'd been at
the company, whatever that was.
And.
I did what I was told to do.
I went, I looked at the logs to see if the dump was good, cuz we used dump in
those days and the dump wasn't good.
So then I looked at the day before dump wasn't good, I looked at the
day before and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on.
And I finally found the tape that was, um, That was good.
And it was, uh, six weeks and one day old, and I knew that I had the transaction
logs along that time, so I was, you know, I'm thinking that that'll work.
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.
And so I remember, you know, my boss Susan Davidson.
I remember her standing over me and saying, So let me get this straight.
We have no backups of Paris whatsoever.
And I said, That is what I'm saying.
And.
You know, to her credit, she attributed the problem to, to bad training.
That's you Ron.
Um, to bad training.
And what what had happened was we had migrated the server.
Nobody had told me that there was this, this, um, chron job that had been shutting
the database down for the backups.
And I learned a lot of valuable lessons, or I took, I, I.
I don't know a lot of who I am and how I do things come all the
way back to that first episode.
I don't like, like a completely separated cron job that's
doing something for my backup.
Before I do the backup, I want the backup to kick off the cron job.
Right?
What, You know what I'm saying?
the CRO job kicks off the backup that kicks off the job.
You know, I need coordination and I've always, you know, when every, when anybody
starts talking to me about two separate processes that are gonna handle, you
know, that are gonna do this, if they don't have a handshake mechanism, I
get very, very nervous because of that.
Um, cuz I continued to back up the database all the time while
the database was changing and not putting it into hot backup.
Uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: It's like the case where a lot of people are like, Oh
yeah, I just take a snapshot, and then someone just dumps that off the tape.
It's like, what happens if the thing that did the snapshot failed for some
reason, you're now gonna think you have a successful backup, and guess what?
You don't.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, yeah.
And I understand that that's something.
Oracle DBAs fight over the, the DBAs want to be in charge of their
backups, but the backup person has to be in charge of the backup system.
So how do you get those two, you know, to, to get together?
You know, we could have a whole episode just about that.
Uh, we probably should have an whole
episode
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I spent quite a bit of my career focused on that one problem.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
, you did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Before you talk about like the reasons we back up, I
think it's important to state that you back up not because you want to back up.
It's like you had said, you need to make sure that you're able to recover your
database, your application, whatever it is, whenever something happens, right?
That's the entire purpose of doing backups is
W. Curtis Preston: you
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.
So that I could have a grandkid.
They're way better than kids.
She's sitting right outside there.
She's adorable.
And she's nine and I'll take her over either of my two kids.
Uh, but the thing is, you gotta have kids before you can have.
That's just the way it works.
Same thing with backups.
So I've divided the, the reasons that we back up the risks to
your data into three groups.
Uh, human disasters, mechanical failures, uh, and natural disasters.
So, human disasters to me are things that humans cause.
We can think of all sorts of categories of those.
And I'm gonna give what I still think is the number, the
number one reason we restore.
What's that?
What do you think that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: User did something dumb.
W. Curtis Preston: That's exactly right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: I accidentally deleted a folder and
I intended to only delete a file.
Oops.
Or I think I still, I can't remember.
I think you have a story, right?
Where someone had a script that accidentally deleted a file
server and erased all of the
W. Curtis Preston: in the book.
Yeah.
They were, What they were doing is they were purging home directories
that were no longer for users that were no longer in the password file.
. And so they were going, you know, home one and then they went to the, the first
directory and then they'd look up the name of the directory in the password file.
And if it wasn't there, cuz the name of the directory was
just name of the, of the user.
The problem was home one slash a slash all users beginning with a.
And so they got to home one A looked up for a, in
the password
file they were there and then de Yeah.
And they were half, they had deleted half the home directories before
we figured out what was going.
Oh Gonda.
Okay.
So, um, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: like you said, most of 'em are.
Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: it's dumb stuff.
It's, it's dumb stuff by users, dumb stuff by admins, dumb stuff by developers.
Right.
Um, you know, that sort of dumb stuff.
And then we have bad stuff, right.
That happens outside.
This is, I think today we're starting to think of this as.
You know, the first is, I think the number one reason you need a backup system.
This is the number one reason you need a good backup system.
You need a really good backup n dr system, and that is malicious attacks,
ransomware, you know, malware, um, you know, and internal threats, right?
Uh, what do we call those?
Rogue admins,
right?
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Deleting all your data and going out, and I actually
just read about that recently.
Uh, who was it?
I think someone recently got sentenced to jail because, uh, what did they do?
They had been fired from their company.
They still had access to the passwords because the company had not cycled them.
And so they logged into the company, deleted, changed the
accounts, locked them out.
I think they might have deleted things as well.
And then their entire purpose was they wanted to be rehired for higher pay Right.
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.
Do you have rogue admins like this?
Right?
Where if you have someone who has a keys to the kingdom, or you don't
know all the places that people like, you don't have a proper onboarding
offboarding procedure to lock down your environment and delete things, right?
You can have people access your data, change things, delete things
like backup systems, all the
W. Curtis Preston: And, and this, and this isn't a backup thing, but
what do we learn from that kids?
Have a proper onboarding and offboarding procedure.
. I have been let go once or twice in my career, right?
Uh, sometimes it was layoffs, sometimes it was a difference of opinion, and the um,
as to whether or not I should be employed.
I've had at least once where my account got disabled and then I
got a call like a minute later.
Right.
That's an off, that's an off boarding procedure.
Right?
And by the way, I wasn't doing anything malicious.
They weren't that, that was the off boarding procedure was your account was
disabled, you were told to renew your password basically is what it looked like.
You were told to renew your password and then boom, you,
you know, you got the
you got the call.
Which is why to this day when I, when my password times out, which it does, right?
I'm like, Oh, what, what did I do?
To this
Prasanna Malaiyandi: And it would be bad.
Well, and it would also be bad if that happened to just coincide with
a one on one with your manager,
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Yeah.
When, when you, um, Uh, yeah, and I had that happen last week where my, where
my manager, they sent me a thing, you know, I, I have a weekly, you know, one
on one and, and I had a, it was at three 30 on Monday afternoon, and suddenly it
was, it was at nine 30 on Monday morning and I was like, Ooh, that's not good.
What It turned out to be fine.
Nothing was wrong, but that's what happens, you know, when you've
been let go once or twice in your
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
But, but, but, I think going back to the point, more people need to start
thinking about malicious actors,
right?
Especially as they're designing backup systems, thinking about
disaster recovery, right?
Which is a huge, uh, topic that we always talk about on the podcast, right, is
you really should be thinking about how quickly, cuz it's not good enough to
just recover your data anymore, right?
It's how quickly can you recover your data to recover from like a ransomware
attack or other things like that.
W. Curtis Preston: And I would say that you should really, especially look at
the backup system and ask yourself, what kind of damage could Curtis, who's
running the whole backup system, what kind of damage could Curtis do to us
if Curtis got pissed off one afternoon?
Now, this isn't about Curtis.
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
masquerading as a rogue admin.
And I know that we, uh, at Druva, we added features that, um, that were
designed specifically to work around that.
Even if someone compromises your account, we still won't let them
do the things that they want to do.
Um,
And,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: and, even things like mfa, like we've seen a lot of recent
attacks with MFA and other things, right?
That isn't a fail safe, right?
So you need to make sure you have all these various layers to handle
the risk rather than just putting all your eggs in one basket, be like, Yep,
that'll protect me cuz it will not.
W. Curtis Preston: So, uh, the second big category, uh, is
hardware and system failure.
And I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna see, see what you think
about this cuz you've lived.
The other side a little differently than me.
Um, I'm gonna say, so when I started my career, this was,
I don't know, but not equal.
But it was a significant, it wasn't equal to the dumb user, right?
Because we would get, we had 12,000 employees.
We would do an average of 10 restores a day.
From users calling in.
My favorite was a user that called in and said that they needed a file to be
restored and it was called resume.Doc.
And I'm like, Really?
Is that what that file is called?
Resume dot doc?
Yeah.
It's really important that I have this restored.
Okay.
All right.
Um, no, you know, no judgment, but, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: You're like, Shall I restore it to an alternate location
like another, a future employer,
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Try to grok this.
Okay.
Back then we had servers running on hard drives, and by that I
mean individual hard drives.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
The, the most failing thing in the data center, we would have a server running the
whole environment, and then the data would be stored on a series of hard drives.
There was no raid.
Right.
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.
You had 10 single points of failure, right?
Wasn't just one single point of failure.
You had 10 single points of failure.
So back then, I think mechanical failure and system failure was a much bigger.
Today we have virtualization and we have raid, and we have failover,
and we have vMotion and all that
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: I
Prasanna Malaiyandi: You have erasure coding you have?
Yeah.
High availability,
clustering, all the rest,
W. Curtis Preston: We don't, generally it can happen.
We don't generally restore because of that today.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: typically, Yeah.
It happens underneath the covers.
Unless it's an application that isn't.
Like a modern application, like a lot of environments still are running older
applications that may not be virtualized.
Right.
And yes, it could, but
W. Curtis Preston: But it's probably still stored on disc
that's
RAIDed
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
So the storage side, you might be okay, but maybe the server side
you might still have issues, Right?
That you still have to be concerned about if, assuming it's not virtualized
or you can't
W. Curtis Preston: might go down, but I don't have to reach for my
backups if the storage is still okay.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: That's all I'm saying.
It's generally a human being did something stupid.
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
from a hardware failure is there are still cases where you might get silent
data, corruption and other aspects.
Right.
That you still might need to worry about.
That isn't necessarily human error.
Well, it's the developer error potentially.
Right,
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Right.
But that's the only other thing I can think of where you, Yes.
It's not necessarily that you have to think about the hardware
itself failing, but there are still components within it, which might
lead to data corruption and affecting.
W. Curtis Preston: You know, it's interesting that you mentioned that.
I'm not sure if I brought up, if I brought up, data corruption
just happening over time.
I, I think I'm gonna count that as system failure, as,
as, as a hardware failure, right?
Because it's the underlying mechanism.
Um, I don't know if I mentioned that in the hardware failure section or not.
Maybe I did, maybe I didn't.
But, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: There you go.
For our listeners, it's something that isn't in the book.
If it's not in there,
W. Curtis Preston: Well, it may not, may not be in the book.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
Having worked in storage for so long, it's one of the things that's always on
my mind, even though I think a lot of people don't think about it, cuz there's
a lot of scrubbing that happens and all the rest that it's not as likely anymore.
But it's not that it's been eliminated.
W. Curtis Preston: There, uh, there are those who think that, that, that bit
rot is a, is a boogeyman that people like you and me use to scare people.
Um, those people can go pound sand.
So the next we'll talk about again, something that's very current.
So I am from Florida, originally from Florida.
I live in, I live.
Much better weather.
Now, down in, in,
Sango, it's relative
Um, yeah.
My, my mother does not like the weather here.
She thinks it's too cold.
The idea of getting cold, you know, cool at night is she's,
does not like that at all.
I think that's the single greatest feature, possibly of sun ago.
Um, but I'm speaking of course, of, of natural disasters.
So we're recording this as they are.
Recovering from the fourth strongest hurricane ever to hit landfall in
the us, which is Hurricane Ian.
I, you know, it was, it was 150 miles an hour.
I've been in worse.
I was actually in Houston, and I don't know where Alicia falls, but what
I remember was 155 miles an hour.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston: Hurricane force winds with Alicia and I was in Houston.
So you're basically right.
You're right there on the water.
Right?
Um, and.
That was a mess.
Right?
I remember I was in, I was, well, I was in Alvin, which, um,
shout out to the folks in Alvin.
It's a tiny little town that's a suburb of Houston, and my mother and her
husband managed an apartment complex.
I was a teenager.
There wasn't enough plywood to cover the windows on both sides.
So I remember that we covered one side based on the direction of the wind, and
then when the, when the, uh, eye hit, we took down all the plywood and put
it on the other side of the building.
Um, the, just trying to minimize the, you know, the blast radius
as we talk about in it, right.
And the thing is, when you, you know, we've got a couple of great episodes about
this, about recovering from a natural disaster, um, from, from people that
actually participated in it, and maybe we'll get another one here from Florida.
But the, the challenges when you look at.
You know, so I'm looking here at the list that I had in the book.
Floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, uh, typhoons and cyclones.
Tornadoes and sinkholes.
So what's interesting is Florida has all but the earthquakes,
so well, it doesn't have.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Typhoons?
W. Curtis Preston: a typhoon goes the other way.
Right?
That's what it isn't that what the thing was, the typhoon.
Um, and remember we had another name of storm I, I never
even heard of until we had the, the Derecho, um, which is a
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Land
W. Curtis Preston: based hurricane.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
You basically get like a, the giant pattern and the high sustained winds, so
it basically becomes a land hurricane.
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah, we, The guy that was on here, I remember him saying
that he was just standing on his porch and he's like, I'm sorry, what is that?
like just outta nowhere.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston: Um, the, the thing about all of these is that they wipe
out everything, you know, look at the photos, look at the videos of
what's happened in, um, in Florida.
Fort Myers right now is, Um, devastated.
I think the worst pictures of videos I remember was Katrina, right?
Because you had the combination of all of this, plus the fact that New
Orleans was essentially underwater.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: They were, they were below sea level, right?
And so you see the pictures of Fort Myers, now everything's
destroyed, but the water's gone.
Right now back with Katrina, it was still, the water was
still
up.
You know, bodies were literally still floating around it.
It was horrible.
Um, and it, and it, and it made rescue very difficult cuz it meant everything
had to be boats and helicopters.
Right.
Um, but I think that's the number one thing to take away when
preparing for a natural disaster.
Is that nothing that you're used to counting on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
I assume it's
all gone.
Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: So that was what I think we learned with that.
That person there that came on.
Um, do you remember he, he talked about the internet.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
I think if I recall, they had an ISP or an msp, and they basically
were like our employees needed access, internet access to make sure
things were okay in supporting their customers, and they had no internet.
So I think people drove like an hour and a half, two hours away to like a
Starbucks, so then they could log in just so they can continue and have
access because they needed to keep their business up and running and that
was the only way they could keep it.
W. Curtis Preston: That that's, that's one problem that they had.
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
system, in order to do the restore,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Oh, that was, Sorry.
That was, Yes, that was the, Sorry.
The one I was talking about was the land hurricane one.
You're right.
W. Curtis Preston: Oh, oh, right.
Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: a hurricane on a tropical island.
W. Curtis Preston: Right.
Yeah.
And the, we, we should put links, I think in the, in the show
description to these episodes.
That was a really good episode.
Like if you wanna know what it's like to actually recover from a
hurricane, Cause he talked about that nothing was consistent, right?
That, you know, they, they could, they didn't have consistent power,
They didn't have consistent internet.
They, they ended up getting consistent internet by doing,
uh, you know, satellite-based.
Internet.
Right.
And they didn't need a lot of bandwidth.
They just needed consistency.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: Um, They
Prasanna Malaiyandi: like food and where to sleep.
Right.
I think he slept in the office
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
He converted one of the offices into a room and they, he
ate a lot of rice and beans
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: weeks.
He
was there
Prasanna Malaiyandi: and he, and he said he was lucky, right?
I think a lot of people didn't have food, didn't have clean water,
W. Curtis Preston: right.
right.
Well, you look at what's going on now, I mean, Puerto Rico, you know,
we talked about a lot about Florida.
Puerto Rico and Cuba are massively hit, right?
Because they, cuz they're getting hit on both sides at the same time.
The place is so small.
Right.
Puerto Rico especially because they had already been hit by that
other hurricane not that long ago.
Um, and you know, it's, it's funny, um, you know, our friends over there at actual
Tech media, Scott Lowe and company, so they're having their 10th anniversary.
Congratulations to them, right?
Um, they scheduled an offsite for their 10th anniversary in October in
Florida, and they're there this week.
Right now they're in Central Florida, they're in Orlando.
They're fine.
But I just, you know, I wish Scott had reached out to me and said, Hey,
I'm thinking about doing a thing in Florida, You know, when should I not go?
And I would've said, September, October.
Don't go.
anywhere near,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
W. Curtis Preston: don't go anywhere
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Weather's unpredictable.
You never
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
It's the, it's the, it's the, you know, it's a hurricane season.
But yeah, that's the big thing is this, but this is why we back up.
A, a, a natural disaster, um, can just wipe out everything
in your company, right?
It, it wipe out, it wipes out the building, it wipes out the
power to get to your building.
It wipes out the internet to your building.
Um, and you have to bring all of that back.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: or you don't bring it back in the current location,
you bring it back somewhere else.
Right.
I know we talk a lot about disaster recovery, but even
without disaster recovery, right?
This is where the 3 21 rule, right?
The one part, right, of keeping a copy off site.
Because if your data center gets hit by a hurricane and is
completely gone, where is your data?
At least your data should be offsite.
Someplace far enough away, right?
Not down the.
Such that you
can recover.
W. Curtis Preston: If you're, in Florida, I don't know where the AWS
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
your recovery facility, I would think, anywhere in Florida.
And that's what, that's what's beautiful about that cloud, right,
is you know, this is why we back up and this is also why we don't store.
At least one copy of our data anywhere near Right.
Um, the, I, I, I think I flashback again, back to MBNA,
and we didn't use Iron Mountain.
We used a small,
um,
media storage company.
Huh?
What's that?
Yeah, Man man, Yeah.
We used a small, uh, company that was in Wilmington.
The thing that we liked about this company, they were probably cheaper
than Iron Mountain, but the thing we liked about this company is that their
tapes were stored in what used to be a World War II bomb shelter, right?
So we felt that they were like really, really safe, but.
. Um, it also meant that anytime there was a hurricane or anything
or flood threatening to come up the eastern seaboard, we would call them.
We'd say it's time for the thing.
And the thing was, they would take all our tapes out of the vault and
move them up to the third floor.
Much less physically secure, but a lot less susceptible to flooding
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, bomb shelter sounds
amazing until you're dealing with water
W. Curtis Preston: Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, I, I highly doubt that they're still using that company,
but, um, anyway, I mean, yeah.
So these are the reasons, right?
What about, you know, we, we, we really didn't mention terrorism,
but that's up in the, you know, in the human, the human disasters.
That, that that's a real thing.
Nowadays, I think you're more susceptible to electronic terrorism
than you are a physical terrorism.
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
first have to build a DR system that works, that would allow you to recover.
Outside of the, you know, make that part of your core design.
And then the next would be you need to build a ransomware, you know,
electronic attack response system.
Because it's, it's the DR piece is, is a subset of that.
So, you know, to, to just summarize, I think the whole thing is that there,
there are, um, there are just so many things that can happen to your data
that is your company's lifeblood.
That's why we back up and, and, you know, and I'll borrow a line from Shakespeare.
Uh, that I use every once in a while when we're talking about some, we're
gonna talk about the, the places that we need to back up, I think next.
When I get to arguing with people about whether or not I should back up SaaS,
one of the phrases that I, that I, um, That I like to use is there are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Right.
I think I quoted that.
I hope I quoted that well.
But basically there are so many ways that your data can get, uh, uh, fubar.
That's a, that's a military acronym.
You're familiar with that one?
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yep.
I know that one.
W. Curtis Preston: Um, and look it up if you dunno what that means.
Um, and.
That's why we back up and that's why, you know, Yeah, I, I I don't know.
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?
We've been talking a lot about in a corporate environment,
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.
Mechanical failure, much more likely in your laptop.
Um, less likely today than it was 20 years ago when we were
using rotating hard drives.
Um, and yeah, still possible.
I will just say this, the most unreliable piece of equipment on your desk is
that mechanical, USB hard drive that you're using as a backup right now.
Tell me I'm wrong.
Prasanna Malaiyandi: Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston: Tell me I'm wrong.
Yeah.
That, that's why, that's why I'm, I'm much more of a fan of,
of, you know, of cloud backup.
And by the way, you know, you wouldn't be a Druva customer, because, you
know, we don't do the, the consumer thing, but there are so many other
things that you do for consumers, right?
There are cloud services to backup your important stuff.
Um, yeah.
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
back to the basics will be what, Curtis, what are we, where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
W. Curtis Preston: Good question.
We talk a lot about some techy stuff.
One of the things that you hear us say a lot is that you, um, you need to go to
the business and you need to get your, um, you know, your service level agreements
and things like RTO and RPO . You need to get that from the business, and you
need to get the business to buy into this whole thing that you're gonna do,
because you can't, you can't be, you.
Batman is not a good backup person, right?
You can't be alone in the night, uh, with no funding doing a backup system.
It's a horrible way to do.
You gotta get the backup.
You gotta get the, the powers that be as into backup as you are.
, Right?
Maybe not as, as into backup as Daniel Rosehill.
Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi: We love you Daniel
W. Curtis Preston: I love you, Daniel.
The backup, anarak, so that's what we're gonna talk about next
is how to, how to bring, how to bring the business into this.
Um, so good.
So thanks for asking me that.
It was a good, it's a good follow.
All right, and I'll just, again, I'll mention, um, if you're interested in
all these topics, you can get a free copy, uh, you know, an ebook copy
of my book, latest book, Modern Data Protection by going to druva.com.
Druva.com/podcast and, um, uh, download your own copy so you can follow along
at Home Kids And, um, remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all