Backups

Today I was fortunate enough to present at the Toronto VMUG. That’s two talks that I’ve given at the TO VMUG this year - not bad considering I only started ‘participating’ in the vCommunity earlier this year! As always, I see these opportunities not only as a way to give back to the community but also as a way to practice and develop my own skills. I am constantly trying to improve my public speaking - I have found that the key for me is to be able to turn my presentations into a conversation (admittedly it is a one-sided conversation). It still takes me a bit of time to ‘slip into’ that mode, but I’m definitely getting better at it. ...

Something that I think is often over looked when it comes to backups is security. I’m not referring to physical security (e.g. locking the media up in a vault), but rather making sure that the backups aren’t being abused. There are plenty of horror stories kicking around about folks who have their backups wiped out. This might be due to a malicious admin, bad hardware, or (more and more common) something like Cryptolocker. ...

I have been spending some time over the last little bit trying to put together a new repository for my Veeam backups. Finding a simple set of recommendations hasn’t been easy, though, largely due to the fact that every environment is different. Despite there being no simple ’this is what you should use for every install’, I took the effort to review a lot of material and put some notes together. A lot of the details were from VeeamOn videos, the Veeam forum, or from their various Veeam eBooks. After going through all of that, I think I have come up with a good solution that fits my environment. ...