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Certified Backup Engineer, Backup Engineering Certification - Savas - 06-25-2018
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)