Dave Lukens from Cockroach Labs joins us to discuss CochroachDB, a highly resilient SQL ACID-compliant database. We discuss the CAP theorum, which says you can choose any two from Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance – but you can't have all three. We talk about which two they chose, and why they believe they're the most resilient SQL database. We also, of course, discuss how you back this monster up! (We also discuss why it's named CockroachDB, and it's exactly what we thought!)

In this bonus episode of Restore it All, Mr. Backup talks BBQ! A few months ago, Curtis did a 15-stop BBQ tour of Texas, and made a series of youtube videos (https://www.youtube.com/wcpreston) about it. This is a bonus episode where Prasanna interviews him about his experience. If you have no interest in BBQ or beef, you can skip this one. Our regular episode will go live next Monday.

Subbiah Sundaram, VP of Products at HYCU, joins Mr. Backup and Prasanna Malaiyandi on the podcast to explain the evolution of the HYCU product line. They have expanded well beyond their original product that was aimed at Nutanix AHV. In addition to VMware, they've added support for Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Kubernetes, and Microsoft 365. They are also clearly focused on delivering their offerings as a service. We then have a very interesting discussion about the use of the multi-region object storage that Google Cloud offers.

Mr. Backup and Prasanna grill George Crump, CMO of StorOne, a software-defined storage company, about their product. We start with an overview, alon with George's claims about not needing backup... .then we challenge him on that topic. George used to be Curtis' boss, so this one's a fun one.

We are super excited to have the Emmy Winning sound mixer Larry Blake on the podcast to talk about his upcoming book "Solving The Digital Dilemma." It is a response to "The Digital Dilemma," which is a paper released in 2007 by the Academy's Sci-Tech Council that discusses long term archiving of a movie. (It describes a very NON-digital solution.) He has edited the sound on over 60 motion pictures, over 30 of which with Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh. This is both a very entertaining and very informative podcast about the about the art and science of archiving motion pictures.

Wolfgang Goerlich, Advisory CISO, explains the current state of information security, and why he thinks many environments are focusing on the wrong things. We speak about ransomware, extortionware, and phishing, even giving examples where we know we have personally been phished! He explains how this illustrates his point that we need more emphasis in different areas of information security.

Mr. Backup and Prasanna discuss the Kaseya attack that happened over the July 4th weekend of 2021. First, we talk about how bad actors use long weekends for attacks, then discuss various things you can/should do to ensure that your environment would not be vulnerable to such an attack. We talk about the kinds of questions that even an unskilled person can ask to help mitigate this risk, including (especially) the all-important questions about backups. We also talk about the need for establishing a "bat-phone" type connection between your environment and any providers you may be using. We have a short talk about the impact that all these attacks are having on ransomware costs, and how you can use your DR site to test patches.

Joe Jurneke has been designing the innards of magnetic devices since 1973, and now he's here to answer our questions. He started with disk, and moved over to tape over thirty years ago, and is now retired – but consults with the tape industry from time to time. We talk in detail about how tape drives work they way they do, their reliability and more. We take down a couple of myths from the guy that was there, even correcting a misunderstanding Mr. Backup has had for many years. If the phrase "magneto crystalline anisotropy" has been used on any other podcast, we'd be surprised. This is a good one you won't want to miss.

We cover my latest book, Modern Data Protection, by O'Reilly & Associates on this podcast. I give an overview of the book, which covers the "Why, What, Where, and How" of backup, archive, and disaster recovery. After giving an overview of the book, I talk about why I wrote, and what it's like to write a book for O'Reilly. Prasanna acted as a tech editor on the book, so he offered his unique perspective as well.

Prasanna and Curtis discuss whether or not can (or will) OVH properly redesign their backup infrastructure to prevent another incident like what happened in March, where many customers lost their sites forever. As we discussed in our previous podcast, OVH had a backup service already that people paid for, and it was not up to the task. OVH"s CEO made an 8-minute video where he discussed some of the things they were going to do to make things better, and we discuss what he said. We talk about their idea of a centralized region just for backups, and whether or not that's a good idea. We also talk about how big of a job they have in front of them. We applaud what we see, but have many concerns that the brief video do not address. We also talk about how this plan is supposed to take five years, and what do OVH customers do in the meantime?