@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actually SIP and then they translate the SIP to PRI on your network edge to make it "sound cool" for people who are out of date and remember when PRI was both still available and actually practical (early 1990s and earlier.)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/

Just an overlook: https://aws.amazon.com/it/blogs/aws/glacier-vault-lock/ . It should be cheaper than tapes or HDD for that range of data.

Veeam DOES recommended avoiding low end NAS devices, and recommends SAN over NAS because Veeam wants block protocols. These parts are true and we don't need to watch videos as they are available in writing from @Rick-Vanover - we even have the author of the best practices here in the community! https://www.veeam.com/blog/vmware-backup-repository-configuration-best-practices.html The keys here are "low end" which is an issue around support. The misleading bit is that NAS means server, so low end servers are every bit affected in the same ways. The QNAP, Synology, ReadyNAS and other such devices are not actually NAS but Unified Storage, SAN as much as NAS. That Veeam recommends SAN instead of NAS is a protocol choice, it does not make those devices any less applicable. We should not be calling them NAS, as that is misleading, they are equally both. If we really look at the guidance and consider what it could mean, the only real concern is "low end" and low end is always of some concern. Why spend so much on Veeam and Windows licensing and then get cheap on the hardware? You want solid storage hardware and solid support. But nothing here is telling us that there is anything wrong at all with these kinds of devices and certainly the issue is not some kind of corruption caused by the fact that they are in this product category.

Simplistically speaking, when it doesn't work. If it works, then it's a backup. If it does not work, then it's a waste of time and disk space.

@JaredBusch said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device: @matteo-nunziati said in Hardware Design for SAM-DR Small Rackmount Backup Device: @scottalanmiller just a question (sw not hw) why veeam rather than say.. altaro. Just curious! There is no backup software on this device. It is a storage target. One assumes that @scottalanmiller will be using some base OS that lets you setup basically any type of connectivity. Ok! Got it wrong! Thanks for clarifying

lol - the ultimate in ransomware protection. watch they don't raise prices, that's a premium feature

@scottalanmiller Replacement as (rather than use vanilla rsync) I'll go with this version.

I've used rsnapshot a good bit and it's a really nice tool for simple backups.

@aaronstuder Tried it today in Windows enviroment for both server and client, and while it is easy to setup it took forever for 1 image BU to complete. not sure why was not limited in CPU or RAM, and after 45 mins I stopped it and didnt care about it anymore, the client was fresh windows with 14 GB on C :

@scottalanmiller said in Share Your Backup Failure Stories to Celebrate Backup Day: @RojoLoco said in Share Your Backup Failure Stories to Celebrate Backup Day: Backup Exec.... Say no more, we feel your pain. Sadly we have that in one area as well. I don't understand why.

It's true that you can make stateless systems without DevOps tooling and approaches. But the nature and assumptions of those systems is that you cannot. Just letting arbitrary logins (even of administrators) can undermine that. One of the beauties of the pure DevOps model is the lack of logins. Much like functional programming.