The Backup Wrap-Up

Lindsey Schulz MD/MPH joins once more on the podcast to discuss the great news we have had in the last few weeks around the Coronavirus (COVID-19). There are THREE vaccines that have been announced that all exceed the goals the medical community set, and will all be applying for emergency use authorization from the FDA. She explains the pros and cons of each of the three vaccinees we know about at this point, as well as giving a little info about another vaccine that is expected to announce soon. This is great news!

In a departure from our normal coverage, I decided to bring on Mark Thompson, who was the Site Manager for the election polling site I volunteered at last week. He gives us insight into how elections are managed in the US, and what we do to prevent fraud and ensure the overall integrity of the system. We talk about the technology used on the front end of the polling process, which in San Diego county including Electronic Poll Books (EPBs) and Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs). We then also talk briefly about the checks and balances in the actual counting process. Although this is a departure from our normal fare, I think a lot of people will benefit from the info we discuss.

Also, I also posted a blog post about this topic here: http://www.backupcentral.com/why-its-really-hard-to-rig-a-national-election/

Prasanna and Curtis talk about two recent ransomware attacks on hospitals and what we can learn from them. They also discuss things you can do to protect yourself from such attacks, and how to prepare to respond if you get one. We especially talk about the 3-2-1 rule and the remote desktop protocol (RDP) and how these figure into protecting yourself from such things.

This isn't a rebuttal to last week's podcast, but it might seem that way. Last week we talked about the advantages of tape for very long term retention (e.g. 10 years), one of which is a significant cost advantage. This week we will discuss how backup, recovery, and disaster recovery are very different use cases, and why disk and cloud is a much more appropriate place for that use case. Joining us to discuss this topic is Druva's CTO, Stephen Manley, who has spent many years at companies that use disk for this purpose.

Matt Starr, CTO of Spectra, comes on the podcast to discuss the advantages of tape for long term storage. We talk about how tape is actually better at holding data long term than disk is – 10,000 times better if you compare it to SATA disk. We also talk about the advancements in tape in the last 10-20 years that have made libraries like Spectra's even more reliable than they used to be. Finally, we talk about the Spectra T-Finity library that can now hold an Exabyte of data in a single unit! What started this whole idea of bringing Matt on was Spectra's eBook that said that the T-Finity tape library was significantly cheaper than Glacier Deep Archive if you store your data for a long period of time (e.g. 10 years or more). Here's the eBook that got the conversation started: https://bit.ly/37BtTkK

Daniel Rosehill, a self-described "backup anorak," joins us to discuss how difficult it can be to backup consumer SaaS services, such as Evernote. Daniel used to use EverNote on Linux, and sent a message to their support system on how to backup its data. They had no answer unless you were using it on Windows. We talk about Google Drive, Dropbox, and other consumer-grade cloud services, and how the challenges of backing them up should be a concern for any users of these platforms – not just backup anoraks. (An anorak is a slightly prejorative term that refers to someone who is interested in a not-so-leading idea – like backups.)

The Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat hunting team found that a big customer of theirs had misconfigured two critical Amazon Web Services (AWS) services. If these misconfigurations were exploited by hackers, it could have created a data breach that could have cost the customers tens of millions of dollars. Prasanna Malaiyandi and W. Curtis Preston (Mr. Backup) discuss this misconfiguration, and what you can learn from it to protect backups you store in the cloud.

A mystery guest from a multinational corporation that experienced a disaster during a recent hurricane describes their mostly-disk NetBackup environment and how they used it to recover from a hurricane that ravaged an island. (Company and location names are changed or not mentioned so "Harry Potter," our mystery guest, can speak freely.)

Shalabh Goyal(@goyalshalabh) joins us on this podcast to discuss sharded databases – and MongoDB and Cassandra in particular – and how one might go about backing them up. Suffice it to say that it is complicated. We learned a lot from recording this podcast and you will learn a lot listening to it!