W. Curtis Preston—known as Mr. Backup—is an expert in backup, storage, and recovery, having worked in the space since 1993. He has been an end-user, consultant, analyst, product manager, and technical evangelist.
He’s written four books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery.
Cloud backup providers aren’t infallible. Be sure to ask hard questions of providers about their storage redundancy, geo-replication, data integrity measures, and disaster recovery capabilities.
Swapping backup products is risky, so make sure your reasons for the change are ironclad.
Ransomware that's aimed at backup infrastructure can put critical backup repositories at risk as well as expose a treasure trove of corporate data.
Ironing out recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) is crucial to balancing what stakeholders want and what it will cost to meet those expectations.
When choosing the appropriate archive option, enterprise storage professionals need to consider data preservation, accessibility, and resource optimization.
Full-file incremental forever, block-level incremental forever or source depulication? The best way to choose is to perform backup and recovery tests and evaluate the performance of each method.
Replication excels at providing immediate data availability, but it shouldn’t be the sole safeguard against human errors, data corruption, or cyberattacks.
Snapshots are virtual copies that can rapidly recover data but depending on the approach can have very different performance characteristics.