@scottalanmiller said in Azure Warm Backup Site: @IRJ said in Azure Warm Backup Site: Both places had under 250 employees and had offside data centers. But had on prem for their primary workloads? We had a very old core that only supported a few apps and none of them were SaaS at the time

Can you reassign disks between VMs yet? The hot add disks was a huge pain before. I couldn't believe I wasn't able to do that.

@CCWTech said in Restoring Google Drive Folders Instead of Individual Files: Unfortunately what they did ended up orphaning the files. https://support.google.com/a/answer/6008339?hl=en Ouch

@Pete-S said in “Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data: So if you make a backup to something like Backblaze. Would that be considered an offline backup? Depends how it is done. It's online, not offline. But it can be airgapped.

@NashBrydges said in Backing up Office 365: @Dashrender @Jimmy9008 My largest client to use this for their Office 365 backup has 42 mailboxes and it works very well for them. I can't confirm with anything larger than that though. In theory then it should work well for me. Will test and see. Thanks

@wrx7m said in Why DR Plans are Important and Need to be Tested: This is a good reason to have more than one credit card from more than one bank. This isn't just a credit issue though. It's people literally unable to access their own money, not money on credit. More so if people have the money in their checking/savings account to pay their bills why should they have to pay their bills on credit?! The bank had better pay off any interest if their customers had to use a credit card to pay for anything during this time to get things back to Zero.

So, circling back. How is the backup project going?

In the event now.

@Pete-S said in Redundancy is building a bridge and an identical one immediately next to it: Regarding evolution we are probably more geared towards surviving external threats than we are towards surviving internal organ failures by old age and a sedentary lifestyle. Right, almost certainly. Partially because in the big picture, that's the bigger threat. Not in this particular moment in time, although in parts of the world that remains true. But to get to where we are, we have to be geared towards overall survival and can't change the design quickly when the situation suddenly changes.

@JaredBusch said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @dafyre said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @JaredBusch said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @dafyre said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @Donahue said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @JaredBusch said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @dafyre said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @black3dynamite said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @dafyre said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @black3dynamite said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @Markferron said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: @DustinB3403 said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: Can I ask why you are protecting user devices though? Generally these have very little on them and through simple policy can everything be saved on your servers or cloud and thus don't need backup. I would really like to do this. We have onedrive available for all of our users and I was thinking of coming up with some sort of system that just uses their onedrive as the primary source of their homefolder. That's how I do it but we are using Nextcloud. All users root folders under their user profile is linked to the actual folders in C:\Users\john.doe\Nextcloud{Desktop, Documents, etc...}. And the data is synced back to the Nextcloud server and that server is backed up. How do you go about doing that? Editing the location of Desktop, Documents, etc... ? Use Junction Points. Its like using symbolic links in Linux. Oh... Duh, lol. Thanks. I'm just trying to figure out how that would work if you have to do more than a few client machines at a time. Something like this. It is not ready for prime time, but was my starting point last week when setting up a new desktop. $User = Read-Host "Enter UserName" Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Desktop" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Desktop" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Desktop" -Force Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Documents" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Documents" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Documents" -Force Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Downloads" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Downloads" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Downloads" -Force Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Favorites" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Favorites" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Favorites" -Force Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Music" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Music" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Music" -Force Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Pictures" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Pictures" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Pictures" -Force Remove-Item -Path "C:\Users\$User\Videos" New-Item -ItemType Junction -Path "C:\Users\$User" -Name "Videos" -Target "C:\Users\$User\Nextcloud\Videos" -Force where would this be run from, the DC? This would have to be run from the End-user's computer from the looks of it. You are trying to screw with the end user's folders. they have to exist, and you have to have rights to them. neither of which are true of an admin account. Are you automating this -- then How? If you're not automating it, then why not just manually add the folders to the NextCloud client? /sigh FFS... @JaredBusch said in Crashplan vs Backblaze in 2018: Something like this. It is not ready for prime time, but was my starting point last week when setting up a new desktop. lol. I thought you were talking about the code... Time to research a way to do that.

@Obsolesce said in Hyper-V Node Failover Cluster Control: @JaredBusch said in Hyper-V Node Failover Cluster Control: @Obsolesce said in Hyper-V Node Failover Cluster Control: @DustinB3403 said in Hyper-V Node Failover Cluster Control: How can I migrate my VM's from Host 1 to Host 2 and ensure that the VMs don't attempt to automatically migrate back to their preferred host? Migration? It's definitely not automatic in the least. Planned failover? There's a checkbox to uncheck if you don't want automatic reverse replication and the VM to automatically start up. Could that be what you meant? Of course it is. In an actual cluster. Which involves System Center Configuraiton Manager (SCCM). @DustinB3403 used the word cluster, but he does not have one. Oh shit, I missed that it was about a cluster. I was thinking Hyper-V Manager, right-click, live migration. Totally spaced there. Yeah, that was my point, it is not a cluster.

@scottalanmiller said in B2 Backup checkup: @Emad-R said in B2 Backup checkup: Then if you do this how you do you check that the Backups are good or you just the tar archive. You'd untar them. That is a full check. But without paying to download the file you just uploaded, you hash the file first and send the hash along with the upload. B2 will hash it when completed and verify that it matches your supplied hash. If it doesn’t, it asks it to reupload.

@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.

@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.

@obsolesce said in Agent and Agentless Backups: @stacksofplates said in Agent and Agentless Backups: @obsolesce said in Agent and Agentless Backups: @stacksofplates said in Agent and Agentless Backups: As much as I like to argue with @scottalanmiller I have to agree that usually agents are easier. Because the agent based backup meant that to recover the entire guest, I would have to mount a special ISO, it wasn't nearly as straightforward as "restore this backup from 15 minutes ago to Host 2". That is in no way a requirement of agent based systems. This sounds more like there isn't a reliable way to reproduce a system and the data isn't on a separate volume. Make sure the systems can be rebuilt immediately and you can just reattach the data and be done. Even with something as simple as ReaR, you define your skeleton volumes you want backed up and include that in your template. Example (I'll use Ansible since that's what I know): The template would have this in it: BACKUP_PROG_INCLUDE=('{{ backup_dirs | join("' '") }}') You'd have a list (in this case called backup_dirs) that gets iterated over: backup_dirs: - /home/* - /data/* - /var/www/html/* That backup_dirs list is specific to each machine when it's created. The agent based stuff is really simple because it can very easily be specific for each machine and always be specific when the systems are built without any work after the initial set up. Just because a system is backed up via agentless backup doesn't mean the VMs data can't be separate. I could have a VM backed up agentlessly that has its data on a separate volume / virtual disk... then I could instantly restore the VM and OS, reattach the data, and not have to rebuild shit. That's not why I said that. If you have to fully restore a system from an ISO the agent built, then it doesn't sound like the data was separate. No I meant you would boot to a recovery/boot ISO so you can restore the server from within the recovery encironment You're missing what I'm saying. If the data volume is separate you just attach it to a fresh VM and don't have to do that at all. The only time you need to rebuild from that recovery environment is when either the data isn't separate or you can't reliably reproduce the OS volume.

@obsolesce said in Backup Windows with UrBackup: I like the way MBS (as how Microsoft defines as "Modern Backup Solutions") work. Most do CBT very well, like Veeam, SC-DPM, and other modern solutions. I literally refer to these as legacy backups, lol.

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.

@oksana Still backups are needed

SDX Central wrote about the deal as well: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-scale-unite-hci-google-cloud-platform/2017/09/ Scott Lowe at VMware even blogged about it: https://blogs.vmware.com/feed-items/scale-computing-hc3-cloud-unity-seeks-to-tear-down-infrastructure-and-application-walls/ Outside of tech, the deal is being talked about by the likes of Business Inside and Forbes: http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Scale-Computing-Collaborates-with-Google-Cloud-to-Remove-Barriers-to-Cloud-Computing-with-Hybrid-Cloud-MobilityHC3-Cloud-Unity-combines-Scale-HC3-and-Google-Cloud-Platform-on-the-same-LAN-allowing-1002732170 https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2017/09/28/scale-computing-gets-cloudy-with-google/