In order to receive the Backup Engineering Certification, you will need to demonstrate that you are knowledgeable in the  field by mastering all required hands-on exercises. In addition, you will need to shortly discuss each item in our outline in your blog, ideally in separate blog posts per section. At the end of the summer you will give a short laptop-supported presentation where you demonstrate each major data backup concept and how you set it up using software.

Note that unlike other backup-related certifications out there, our certification is hands-on, yet general and not product-centered; rather, it covers general concepts present in the industry. By mastering these concepts using our backup software you can easily apply what you have learned to other solutions, including many specialized and customized solutions you may find in larger corporations.

Below is the outline of what we are going to cover this summer.

Disks
•    Local disks vs remote
•    Physical disk vs virtual disk
•    Virtual disk and their formats
o    VHD, VMDK, VHDX, VDI
o    Where they are being used, their pros and limitations
•    Disk partition layout schemes MBR, GPT
o    History of each, how they work, differences
•    What is a sector and what are common sector sizes
•    Why are sectors used
•    Disk read write latency, how and why, local vs. remote, SSD vs mechanical
•    Disk caching, where it occurs and why, what effects it has
•    What’s a partition
•    Basic disks vs. dynamic disks in Windows

File Systems
•    FAT vs. NTFS
•    Cluster vs. sector
•    MFT
•    Boot volume
•    What is a volume?
•    Transactions and why they are being used
•    What can cause file system corruption and what can you do to
o    Become aware of it
o    Detect /identify it
o    Fix it
o    Prevent it


The Windows Boot Process
•    UEFI vs legacy BIOS boot
•    EFI boot partition, boot loader
•    “Active” partitions
•    Drivers at startup
•    Windows to Go


General
•    What is a log and why do we need one
•    What is error handling?
•    How can errors be avoided in software?
•    What’s a task
•    What’s a task schedule and what are typical ways to configure it?
•    What’s a task scheduler
•    Ethernet intricacies and the effect of traffic spikes
•    Speed throttling, why it may be needed
•    What is task chaining?
•    What are software utilities/tools, scripts, and how does it compare to a software solution?
•    What is multi-tasking? What is multithreading? How does it roughly work in Windows?
•    Explain Windows process/thread priorities
•    What’s a CPU core? How can multiple CPU cores improving performance? How could having multiple CPU cores make a process slower rather than faster?
•    What is a network share?
•    What do you need to connect to a network share?
•    How do you connect to a network share using the command: “net use” from the command prompt?
•    How does local file access differ from accessing files over the local network (LAN)?
•    What is a VPN?
•    When you access a network share over VPN, which is thousands of kilometers away, what is the main difference you will experience compared to accessing a local server’s network share?
•    What is compression?
•    What is deduplication?
•    What is encryption? Which kinds of file encryption algorithms are now popular and why?
•    Why should we (typically) compress first and then encrypt?
•    What is an IP address?
•    What’s an FTP server?
•    What do you generally need in order to connect to an FTP server?
•    When an application connects to another server, roughly what steps are different when connecting to http://ftp.ftp.cnn.com  as compared to connecting to ftp://127.0.0.1?
•    What is a filter? (When selecting files)
•    What’s an exclusion filter, what’s an inclusion filter?
•    What is digital vandalism?
•    What is bit rot?
•    What is accidental deletion?
•    What is ransomware?
•    What is a RAM defect?
•    What effect can a RAM defect have on files on the computer?
•    What is a RAID controller?
o    What is a mirror RAID and why use it?
o    What is a striped RAID and why use it?
o    Why would anyone want to combine these schemes?
o    What is a hardware RAID and what is a software RAID?
•    Is RAID a backup?
•    What is an application and how does it differ from a Windows service?
•    What is (roughly) a user session in Windows?
•    How does generally a Windows Server differ from a Windows 10 PC, what are typical scenarios for using each?
•    User accounts and user sessions in Windows: how to protect against ransomware, theft, vandalism
•    How do SSD hard drives fail?
•    How do mechanical drives fail?
•    What is the annualized workload limit of a hard drive and why should you know it?

Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
•    What is VSS responsible for? Why is it provided by Microsoft?
•    What is a VSS shadow?
•    What can you use shadows for?
•    How is a shadow kept alive?
•    What is a VSS writer?
•    What does VSS aware mean?

Virtual Machines
•    What is a VM?
•    What is a snapshot aka checkpoint?
•    What happens when you revert to a checkpoint?
•    What happens when you delete a checkpoint?
•    How are VMs useful?
•    What are Hyper-V, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox?
•    What is the responsibility of the Hyper-V VSS Writer?

Backup & Restore
•    What’s hot/live/online backup
•    What’s cold/offline backup?
•    What is crash consistency
•    What is application consistency
•    Explain file backup vs sector-level disk backup
•    What is a backup target?
•    What are examples of typical backup targets?
•    Why are alerts being used?
•    What are remote backups?
•    What are cloud backups?
•    What are typical concerns for cloud and remote backups?
•    Compare local backups to LAN backups
•    Compare local backups to remote and cloud backups
•    What is a bad sector on a disk?
•    What are typical disk defects?
•    What is backup verification and how is it useful?
•    What is a traditional incremental backup scheme?
o    How does the “differential” scheme differ?
o    Which one can offer faster restores and why?
o    Which one is more economic with space usage?
•    Compare tape backup vs. backing up to hard drives and network shares
•    What is a mirror backup?
•    What is file version backup?
•    What general steps occur when a backup solution backs up a recent version of SQL Server or Exchange Server, which are both VSS aware services?
•    What is a NAS device?
•    How does a NAS device differ from a regular PC or Windows Server?
•    What are the pros and cons of having a centralized backup server?
•    What are the pros and cons of backup media rotation?
•    How can you keep track of file changes over time?
•    Why do many companies keep multiple copies of their data in different places?
o    Why do many companies not do it?
•    Why would anyone oppose cloud backup?
•    Compare backups:
o    Deduplicated (incremental vs differential)
o    Compressed
o    Plain (unprocessed)
o    What are the pros and cons of each of those types?
•    User accounts and user sessions in Windows: how to protect your backups against ransomware, theft, vandalism
•    How to determine the amount of data that needs to be backed up?
•    How to determine how much backup space is needed?
•    How to “go back in time” with backup software and restore data from the past? Which technologies and backup schemes can be used and how?
•    How long should data be backed up / archived?
o    How do you make that decision?
•    Which data on a server needs to be backed up and what areas don’t need backup? Why?
•    What are these conversions and when and why are they useful:
o    Virtual to physical (V2P). Convert a VM to a physical computer
o    Physical to virtual (P2V)
o    Virtual to virtual (V2V)

I have already set up my FTP server, but I would like to know if I have done it correctly. Is it possible for anyone to post the steps to successfully setting up an FTP server as well as using FileZilla if possible? Thanks in advance!

How about

Friday 22nd of June at 1PM at UMBC RLC?


Please vote before Thursday!

We'll now dive into backup and restore relevant subjects.
Applications vs Services
Considerations Clients/Desktop PCs vs Servers
Transactions
Volume Shadow Copy Service
Application consistency
Crash consistency
Data loss: Malware damage  (you may want to read http://backupchain.com/en/wp-content/upl...y-Data.pdf
Tasks
Schedulers
User Sessions
Basic Backup Strategies
Local vs remote backups
etc.

Enjoy this beautiful summer weather!

Hi everyone! I have come across a little dilemma. While setting up my ftp site, I was unable to connect using the url: ftp://(my ip address), and I get an error page that states: "Unable to connect."

My settings for the ftp site are attached with this thread.

Attached Files

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I am curious to what FileZilla is, but I know that it should be used for this milestone. Is it supposed to be downloaded? Is there a link for the download?

Please commit to a certain deadline and post here the date and time. Once the milestone is completed please reply here with your blog address
Thank you!

How much time do you have available to work on internship tasks per week?

Which platform have you used

Do you prefer deadlines?