@Donahue said in Adding tape drive: at this point, I would have to get management buy in to really consider cloud, I want to evaluate the options before hand to know how much I should or shouldn't be pushing for the cloud. Recent conversations with @scottalanmiller have me questioning our historical reasons and motivations for why we use what we use. In my case, we have a mix of prior misinformed speculation and my limited personal experience. I don't see a reason to emulate tape if I'm not going to use tape, but I really don't know Well if you use tape, then no reason to emulate.

@gjacobse We have a tower beside our house that is isolated from the house to prevent a dual-ground situation. All cables that run into the house are completely isolated to prevent anything jumping in. We had a client in Edmonton that had a fax modem and a fax service running on a PC. When we set it up the POTS line was grounded prior to running into the PC. Somewhere along the way something was moved around and the POTS line in from the wall got plugged in to the PC modem directly. An active storm had a strike against the pole in the alley and sure enough besides the boom scaring the carp out of folks the PC was dead. When we opened it up the controller chip on the modem was literally blown out as was the chipset chip under the heatsink. Time for a new PC!

What account the sql account or the azure login?!

I have Amazon Prime so I get unlimited photo storage through that (including raw image files).

@jnaugle also worth noting, no one actually delivers PRI today, that entire market is a scam. It's actually SIP and then they translate the SIP to PRI on your network edge to make it "sound cool" for people who are out of date and remember when PRI was both still available and actually practical (early 1990s and earlier.) PRI is not nearly as powerful as SIP, nor as cheap, so phone providers long ago "all" moved to providing SIP instead (PRI isn't possible without a physical T1) and "virtualizing" PRI on top of it. All the PRI does it increase cost and lower performance, flexibility and reliability. So the best solution is to get the phone provider to stop pretending to do PRI and just give you the raw SIP. This improves your phone quality by removing unnecessary steps and limitations, removes the need for you to convert back to SIP (gateway, card, however you do it) and makes everything better for everyone. The PRI interface has no advantages, only disadvantages. It takes the better SIP, and cripples it. For people running ancient phone systems from before VoIP, SIP isn't possible, so these terrible PRI interfaces are useful for them to continue to be able to hook up those ancient phone systems while still being able to connect to current phone companies. They aren't totally useless, but they are useful only for that one terrible niche case.

@jaredbusch said in Backup server - Software layout: I use teams, even if there is only one NIC in the team most of the time, because I can add and remove NICs without impacting the higher layers. Good idea. This server I just got has the onboard GB NICs, but also 2 dual port Intel GB NICs as well. I could create a BIG team if I wanted.

@nerdydad said in 3 steps to maintain the 3-2-1 backup rule: @scottalanmiller said in 3 steps to maintain the 3-2-1 backup rule: @nerdydad said in 3 steps to maintain the 3-2-1 backup rule: @oksana Is there a way of pointing Starwind VTL to a private cloud provider instead of Microsoft blob, Azure AWS, or Backblaze? It's not that easy. What API is that private provider using? ¯＼(ツ)/¯ Then how would they point to it? It's like asking "can I use a thing"? I don't know, depends what that thing is.

@dustinb3403 said in Evaluating OneDrive for Business to replace traditional end point backup: At approximately $12/user you get 1TB/user Yeah but you also get Exchange and a full Office Suite.

And I can’t tell you because I can’t install the motherfucking thing.

@fuznutz04 said in Backup server comparison: @black3dynamite Ah yes, SLAT. Almost forgot about that. I ran into that trying to install HV 2016 on a REALLY old box for testing. I could install it, but that's where the story ended. If I get the E5620 or higher in the Xeon family, I think I should be fine. I know for sure that the E5620 works. I have them in my R710. The same thing happened to me. So it made my decision to use KVM even easier for what I was using the server for.

@black3dynamite said in Should I backup my file server VM or just the files?: @scottalanmiller said in Should I backup my file server VM or just the files?: @jaredbusch said in Should I backup my file server VM or just the files?: Scott likes to talk like everyone uses state systems when that is far from the case. Scott likes to talk like everyone should use state systems, which is nearly always the case. But even if you don't, if you have automated rebuild and install scripts, or use cloud computing, you rarely want to restore the whole thing rather than just the data. It's way more than just state systems. We've been doing this since long before state systems were a thing. With a stand-alone windows file server is not so bad redeploying it with the help of powershell. But it’s so different compare to Linux. Yes, much more work for sure. But no matter what OS you use, no matter what your backup situation is, you should have a rapid new deployment system to rebuild systems whether it is script, state, or whatever.

I stumbled upon Comet Backup and Wasabi. Any feedback about them?

@manheraz This may help a bit: https://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/permissions-for-veeam-backup-linux-repositories/

Veeam also has a Linux based recovery environment that can provide full recovery of Linux VM's into the HC3 system. Unlike windows, the virtio drivers are already built in to the Veeam Linux Recovery ISO so there is no additional step required for it to see the disk to recover to ... so in this example, I just want to restore all of disk vda from the backup repostory to the blank vda disk. Restore the entire disk.

@tim_g One problem is the dirty bitmapping in the API is push only so anything expecting an interactive API won't work. This means the backup system can't query the API for dirty bitmaps, only create them. (At least it was this way the last time I looked at it)

@dims said in Is the 3-2-1 rule antiquated?: the majority of the previous cases of implementing such solutions indicates that the most popular would be the one where the data would first be replicated between 2 hosts, on site and one off prem. Yes, because normally that is insant, you'd not want to wait for the WAN copy before making the local one.

@dafyre said in PowerShell - Script never completes. Is there a session timeout?: @anthonyh said in PowerShell - Script never completes. Is there a session timeout?: @dafyre said in PowerShell - Script never completes. Is there a session timeout?: ROFL. Not a problem. Things working as designed. Next! For what it's worth, my post was intended to be framed from the standpoint of "what am I doing wrong??" rather than "what's wrong with the system?!". I figured I was missing something stupid. Never hurts to have extra eyes. I didn't even think about the potential for this to be a scheduled job... God, I have a case of the Mondays. Not your fault at all. I did not mention it in my OP. Whoops. Perhaps I'm the one with a case of the Mondays.

IMHO, dispersing the storage between the hosts and configuring data replication between them would be the best option. Creating several tiers for the migration of your VMs is always nice to have - downtime strikes unexpectedly.

@nerdydad said in Hurricane Harvey: Expect gas prices to go up as the refineries are also along the Texas Gulf coast. because they will use any and every excuse to raise gas prices.

I like Crashplan and it works well enough that I'm just going to suck it up and pay the $10 a month for the "business" edition since it works with Linux and all that jazz. I will likely use Unison to get all my devices into a central folder on the computer that runs my crashplan backups, and then I don't have to worry about it any more.