MSPs, Are You Selling Backups or Just False Hope? | EP102

[00:00:06] So I, what's up dude, I signed up for the this GQ box, I think it's behind me, yeah, this GQ box and it's got all this like fancy men's stuff in it and there's like body, it's like it's all body deodorant and some like whiskey things, yeah, this is called Whole Body Dio by Dove Maker.

[00:00:29] Something smelly in there and then this Travel Tech Organizer pouch which is definitely from like Tmoo for $45. I'm a sucker for a box subscription. So I'm down to one and most months I cancel it to be honest.

[00:00:50] I am, I currently am getting something called Appy Box. So every month we get like two cheeses, two meats and some like crackers and some spreads and stuff. And because of when I signed up I get free brie every month. You might need to forward that one to me. It's a good one. I like that one because Michelle and I really like a good charcuterie box. Right.

[00:01:16] But like I used to do, you know what's really funny, I used to get the one where like there was a stylist who would pick out clothes for you and they would send you clothes and they were all overpriced or whatever it is. But they would get me because they would handwrite the notes and Michelle always thought it was some like random woman trying to flirt with me. Like Michelle would read the card from this woman who worked at this place being like, hi Justin, just picked out this new jacket for you. Think it would look awesome in your professional setting as an IT professional.

[00:01:46] Like it's clearly like, you know what I mean? Like it wasn't written by a person. Oh yeah. Like I, so the only one I've got right now is Bespoke Post. Oh yeah. I know them because primarily the, usually when they have camping type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, maybe a knife or two. I've been known to buy one of those.

[00:02:09] I have from Bespoke Post, I have their like waxy leather green bag, which I find works great if I'm going out for one night. So I also got, I got the holiday bag from them. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one that, uh, it looks like a duffel bag, but it unzips to be a garment bag. Ooh, that's nice. And I use, that is my primary go-to like if we're doing a weekend somewhere.

[00:02:38] Yeah. See, I don't go anywhere, so it doesn't really matter. That's the downside is to owning your own business. Been an ear, an ear, an ear, an ear. Add DMARC management and monitoring to your MSP services with Easy DMARC. Protect your clients from phishing, spoofing, and impersonation while boosting their trust in your solutions.

[00:03:05] Easy DMARC makes email security simple, effective, and hassle-free. Visit atmsp.link forward slash easy DMARC to learn more and start offering DMARC as a service today. MoveBot makes cloud migrations effortless for MSPs. Whether it's a small client or a large enterprise, MoveBot provides fast, secure, and seamless data migrations. With no hidden fees and unmatched scalability, MoveBot is the tool MSPs trust for their cloud projects.

[00:03:35] Visit atmsp.link forward slash MoveBot to learn more and get started today. I'm always thinking about things here on the All Things MSP Podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Justin Esker. With me always is my good friend, podcast producer extraordinaire, and man who looks like he's inside of a jack-o'-lantern, Mr. Eric Anthony. Thought I would change the lights up a little bit today. Oh, you're matching me. You're matching the theme. I know people are probably confused by my intro. Why don't I start with my normal?

[00:04:05] Like, what's up, everybody? Just because it's later in the day and it's snowing. And to be honest, I don't feel like anyone deserves it today. Way to alienate our listeners. No, it's been that kind of day. Let me, I got to talk to you about what went on. This is where I want to lead into today. I was on a call with a client earlier today and they were asking, a user left and they said, do we have a backup of their data? They're in Microsoft.

[00:04:35] They're a Microsoft client. And I was like, no. And then the other IT guy was like, but their Microsoft account still exists. And the person who was asking was like, great, we have a backup. And I was like, no, their account exists in Microsoft. And he's like, can we get to their data? And I was like, yes. We would reset the password, log in as that user, get to their data. So we have a backup. No.

[00:05:01] And he got mad at me because I was really like nitpicking on the nomenclature because I was like, there's a difference between retention and backup. And he didn't give a shit. Yeah. I mean. And this conversation comes up a lot, right? The difference between backup or retention or versioning, you know, is kind of another part of it there.

[00:05:30] So it was just like I was trying not to piss him off. And I even said, I was like, look, I can see in your mind that you're being frustrated by the words I'm using. But there's a reason I'm saying it this way. And I'm not trying to be like a pedantic pain in the ass. Like the truth of the matter is if someone goes into your office and deletes that user, we don't have a backup. That user exists in the world of Microsoft and Microsoft only. It doesn't exist in a third party system. So we won't be able to like restore if we need to.

[00:05:59] And he's like, well, what if we just retain it for three years in Microsoft? I'm like, that's fine. But don't call it a backup. Don't call it a backup. It's a song. Forget it. You're too old. Anyway, so like I'm like, don't call that a backup because a backup traditionally would mean we can restore if something gets lost, not can we directly access it, which is a retention thing.

[00:06:26] And so like it got a little hairy for a bit. And so the person I was talking to was like, great, we'll write a policy and here's how the policy works. And the policy would be like data is retained within Microsoft for three years after a user leaves. And as long as the user is there, their user exists and they have a backup.

[00:06:46] And if they need to recover any files that they delete during their time at this company, we have a three-year go back and find it poll because that's what we have a three-year retention on the backup. And I said, that sounds great. And the IT person said, well, how do we implement this? And I was like, what do you mean implement it? You literally just have to write it. It's a policy. I was like, the better question is how are you going to get people to follow it?

[00:07:16] Well, okay. You know, I've been out of the Microsoft 365 environment for a little bit, right? Yeah. And so isn't there something like you can turn on or you can upgrade in Microsoft 365 that will enforce that? It's no, because it's all about the administration things, right? It's like, what are we going to do to like not delete her account?

[00:07:43] The IT people just have to not delete her account or delete the user's account. Well, okay. Fair enough. Yes. Yes. But then they have to pay for that account for three years. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't seem like the best solution. They would turn it down, right? Instead of it being like a business standard or business basic or E3, you could turn it down to an E1.

[00:08:10] So it's not as expensive, but also this client's a nonprofit so they don't pay for you once. Oh, I got you. I think that's part of it, right? Like I think from a corporate – well, that's a good question, right? From a corporate standpoint, like what is the best policy to do that kind of stuff, right? Like when we have clients who leave, one of the things that we do is we always do – we always like take their account. Let's say it's in Google, right?

[00:08:39] It's like eAnthony at ATMSP.com. If you were to leave, which would be weird, we would just make you eAnthony underscore archive at ATMSP.com and change the password and pull your two-factor codes and something like that so that way you can't log in. But anyone else in the organization can. And then we tend to set ourselves like a ticket like for six months or one year later to go back to the client going like, do you still need this? Because what happens is you end up with all this cruft and people forget about –

[00:09:08] because what I find is funny is that like everyone believes that like there's some magical key in this person's email that we're going to need one day and it never happens. It very rarely happens. So I guess I would ask this question because there's a lot of discussion all the time about third-party backup and systems like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

[00:09:36] What are your thoughts on not relying solely on 365 or Google to hold and retain the data? So with the exception of legal hold, right? Because that's a whole – Yeah, that's a thing in itself. Zebra with different stripes. Zebra with different stripes, which is also just known as a horse.

[00:10:04] By the way, your kids are too old. My kids, when they were younger, they used to watch – there's a Lion King cartoon show on Disney+. It's about like the Lion King – it's the Lion King's kid. So it's like Simba's kid. Anyway, all the zebras in that show would go, panic and run, panic and run. And they would just run through the screen just randomly. It was like a running joke for the entire fort. Which, by the way, is what an MSP does when they find out that the backups were failing for the last six months. Backups don't matter. Recovery matters.

[00:10:33] We've talked about this. Okay. So I don't – we put everybody in some sort of email backup because Google and Microsoft, as far as I know, have a 30-day SLA on deleted files. You delete a file, you have 30 days to recover it. Other than that, you're on your own. So we put everybody into a backup tool or we have a couple different ones.

[00:11:02] We were big into Backupify and then now they're owned by the big K and it doesn't really work well with Google. Weirdly enough, I've showed them how – it's so stupid that it will error on the API because it tries to back up an account that doesn't exist anymore. So let's say we've gone past the E Anthony underscore archive and we've deleted you.

[00:11:28] It will just fail because it doesn't recognize that you're gone and it just errors and it just has uncompleted backup, which is not something I can show clients because then they go, why isn't it complete? It's like it's not really my fault. Uptune provider, like whatever. But they're cheap as anything. So it's fine. But I put a three-year retention on anything. So that way if you delete a file today, you have three years from today to get it back because you need something, right?

[00:11:57] But luckily, I don't think I've ever had anyone need me to recover anything. Yeah, I mean it's very unusual for that to happen. But, I mean, it does happen enough that – and it's usually critical enough that it makes a difference to actually have those backups in place. I lied. I apologize for cutting off. I lied. I did have to recover.

[00:12:23] We had a staff member at someone who left. Before they left, they got vindictive and they deleted a whole bunch of their emails. And they deleted stuff that was older than 30 days. They should have been – technically, we should have had a better recover from within Google because it was all deleted within 30 days. But it got real messy. And they deleted contacts. So we went into Backupify and we recovered everything right into their system.

[00:12:50] The trick was that because also, remember, we do the underscore archive thing, is that we had to actually not do that. Strip out the password. Strip out the security. Reset it up. Put a different two-factor on just to be like doubly safe that this person wasn't going to get the new password. Right. And then recover everything in. Then change it to archive. Then hand it off to the manager. So that was a little messy. But like it totally worked. Well, that's good. Because we talk about this, right? Like your backups don't matter.

[00:13:20] Your recovery matters. But like how often are people – like how often are people doing fire drills and do testing on their recovery? Like I really don't – I honestly don't have the time to do it. So that's where automated backup testing comes into play. And I think there's enough of those that, you know, you can find one now that works with whatever system you're trying to work with. Wait, I don't know.

[00:13:46] There's tools out there that I can use to like automatically test Backblaze backup? Sometimes they're built into the tool itself. So take Enables Cove, for example.

[00:13:58] There's – when you're backing up an entire server, right, and you can spin up a virtual machine as a disaster recovery mechanism, you can actually – it will spin that VM up, take a screenshot, and I forget if it just puts it in the record or if it actually shows – you know, sends you an email with the screenshot. Yeah. Well, that's cool.

[00:14:26] I should find something like that because we have so many clients that are on Backblaze, you know, and they're backing up their laptops. Like backupify for email is pretty easy because I've spot checked a couple of things and like recovering an EML file is like four and a half seconds worth of work. But recovering from Backblaze I feel like would be much harder. Like the thing is I put my trust in those systems.

[00:14:51] It's not like – it's not like the – those systems that we're putting into – they're not our backups. We're not backing it up to tape locally and taking it off site and hoping that the third hard drive that's in the CEO's safe in their house in the Berkshires hasn't gotten demagnetized. Right? Like we move past that.

[00:15:13] Like we move past that. Like we move past that. Now I'm a little worried. Yeah. And so there's actually a product. I couldn't remember the name of it, so I looked it up. It's called Backup Radar. Okay. It's from ScalePad. And it looks like they do that exact thing.

[00:15:40] They audit the backups to make sure that they are verified complete so that you can pass compliance audits. So let's see. All right. So I want to look at – And sleep at night. Because sleeping at night is underrated, by the way. Screw sleeping. I want to look at the pricing because here's the kicker, right? Because this is definitely a tool that is not one of those like passable price – I mean, yes, you can add it into your overall,

[00:16:09] but it's not like you're going to be able to kick this price onto your clients as a line item. And this is, again, we've had this conversation many times of people raising their prices. You have to raise your prices just because you're changing tools and other things. So right here, I'm just pointing to the pricing. Best for Emerging MSPs, Plan 100 for $200 a month gets you 100 unit licenses. A unit license is assigned to a protected endpoint that is not a workstation or mailbox.

[00:16:35] So examples are endpoints requiring unit licenses are servers, physical and virtual, NAS, phone systems, and exchange servers. You get 5,000 workstation licenses. And those are workstations, physical or virtual. Workstations are not permitted on any endpoint running backups seven days per week. So that means any laptop that's running Backblaze is not a workstation.

[00:17:04] And then mailboxes, unlimited users, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm confused – like that's where the confusion is. A workstation license are assigned to endpoints being used as workstations. Workstation licenses are not permitted on any endpoint running backups seven days per week. Right. So basically what they're saying is you don't need to be backing up seven days a week on a workstation. Wrong.

[00:17:33] I didn't say I agreed with it. I mean – I'm just clarifying for the audience. Yeah. Well, what's your take on it? Tell us. I understand the concept here because like you shouldn't be having anything on your workstation. Everything should be in your file share solution or whatever. And so you're backing that up. Therefore, that would be a unit license. But you only get 100 unit licenses. So like right out the gate, that could be a problem for a lot of people who have 500 endpoints and they're all running Backblaze.

[00:18:03] Yeah. Look, I mean, I agree with what you just said. Anybody who's got laptops or workstations or whatever should not be solely working on data that's on their computer. Yeah. Those folders that you keep those things in, pictures, documents, downloads, should be syncing to somewhere else so that when you're not at your computer, you have access to them.

[00:18:31] And when something happens to said workstation or said laptop, loss, stolen, you know, whatever, all you have to do is get another physical piece of equipment in your hands and you instantly have access to all of your data. See, this is why I like the idea of Apple's automated device enrollment. Device breaks. You turn on a new device, roll it into your system. It downloads all your apps and you connect your file share. Bing, bing, boom, it's your uncle. Yep.

[00:18:58] You know, and if you're using managed Apple IDs, you can turn on iCloud Drive and sync your desktop and documents to your computer. But then it becomes a little bit of a security problem if you're signing into other devices with your managed Apple ID. But still, like the concept of backing things up, like I have a client who was, you know, saying like, you back up all of our systems, right? And I was like, we only back up Google Workspace and your computers.

[00:19:26] And she's like, okay, we'll put it down as all systems. I'm like, don't put it down as all systems. Put it down as Google Workspace and computers. And she's like, why? I'm like, because you do stuff in AWS. You do stuff in Google Cloud. You do stuff in Azure Cloud. You do, you have all these other websites and JotForm and WordPress and all this stuff. And we don't back up any of that. That's not what we do. It's not part of our thing. And you know what? I look forward to your tweets and emails about why we're not doing it for them. But I'll tell you why. You don't know the client.

[00:19:55] But yeah, like there's, you know, it has to be, I think, more defined with the user or the client. I mean, on what is being backed up and how, as well as a retention policy. That's the other thing. Backblaze only did a 30-day retention. And now for an extra dollar or $2, you can do a one-year retention. I love Backblaze. I think they're a great product. They've always, we've always been able to, you know, save our butt with them.

[00:20:26] And it makes sense to have it installed on every device that we have. It's just that it gets, I mean, they're a little costly. You know what I really like about Backblaze? Go back to their old stuff. They used to tell you, they used to actually give specs, full specs on how they build their, what they call their pods, like their hard drive bays, like their units. And they told you how to build it at home. They showed you exactly which motherboard, which hard drives, which connectors. They even, they give you the, they give you the mechanical drawings for the cases.

[00:20:56] So you can like go get them made at your own metal shop. Like it was gorgeous. Loved it. So good question. So we talked about onsite backups before, which are not necessarily a thing anymore, unless you have very large data sets and you require a very quick recovery time. Like video editors and things like that. Yeah. Correct.

[00:21:21] What is your take on having that local repository to support a very quick restore time? You know, there's a reigning theory on the Mac side of things about like spinning up a file share to be like a cloud-based time machine. So this way all the Macs can use time machine to back up. By the way, it never works. But if you are one in one million where you get it to work,

[00:21:49] I always go back to the same take of like, everything should be in the file share. Like video editors are a different breed because of what they have to do. And they need, you know, it's got to be fast. It's got to be local. And they're using, you know, massive SSDs and a RAID zero. So they're getting the maximum speed. Like that's a different story. But that's all should be temporary stuff anyway. And I forget the language, but they should be working on just like the LUN, that small section of what they need to be working on. Right.

[00:22:18] All the data should be not on your computer, which is what pisses me off because I get the amount of alerts I get every day from clients that are too close to the 10% threshold that Mac wants to have for maximum efficiency. Like our watch and monitoring sends me, I get six, seven a day from our clients being like, so-and-so has crossed over the 90% threshold.

[00:22:45] And I'm like, why do you have anything on your computer at all? Like you should just be in the, put it on, put it on the server. That's what it's for. Like get it off your computer. And they're like, like, they never have a good reason why it's mainly just like too much downloading crap. But like it, yeah, there should, there should be no need for a local backup because no one should be keeping anything local.

[00:23:13] I know what you're saying, but like nothing should be on the devices in the first place. Like that's my hard take. My hard take is we should be selling computers. You know, our normal base is like we sell computers, 16 gigs of memory, 512 gig hard drive. No, from now on, we're 16 gigs of memory, 256 gig hard drive to ensure that you don't store anything on it. I think that might create more support tickets than you want. Oh, a hundred percent. I'm not actually going to do this. I know, I know. I'm just kidding. No, but there's my point, right?

[00:23:43] Like there should be nothing on the computer. Like whether it's your, like, I think the caveat for the hard drive thing is those cloud-based file solutions that sync down. So like Dropbox keeps a local version. Right. And that can be a problem. And that takes up hard drive space super fast. Yeah.

[00:24:10] And so what you really want to get them to do is use strictly a cloud-based solution, you know, and both, you know, OneDrive and Google Workspace allow you to only sync certain folders or files or whatever. Dropbox is the same. It's just that people don't calculate and they just do everything. Well, and their default sync everything. Not anymore.

[00:24:35] Now the default is online only, but people know that online only means slow. Yeah. I don't, I, I, I, I always get confused by that.

[00:24:58] Like if the data, like my, my take is just to tell them like the employee, like, listen, your computer is not backed up. Even if it is, I tell them your computer is not backed up. Don't be the one to lose organizational data stored on the server. Yeah. I did. That actually bit me in the butt though. So, um, to do keynote collaboration on a Mac, you have to do it through iCloud.

[00:25:29] And so we told somebody one time, listen, keynote collaboration through iCloud. But when you're done, put the keynote on, they use Ignite. So I said, stick it in Ignite. They misheard what I said and thought they had to store everything on their computer because that's how iCloud syncs. And then they lost the file somehow and didn't know why we couldn't restore it. And I was like, cause your computer's not backed up. You're supposed to put everything on the server. And they're like, that's not what you told me. And I'm like, bullshit.

[00:25:59] Don't you come at me with that. I have my scripts. I know what I say to people. I never once told you this. Yeah. So let's get, we've kind of dive diverged from backup a little bit and I want to get back to it because it is such a critical piece of what MSPs in my opinion need to do because data security is vital to the survival of any company. Right. Yeah.

[00:26:28] You lose all of your data. It's pretty much an extinction event. So, which is not, you know, was not the case when I got into this, right? Yeah. When I got into this, everybody printed things out and still put it in a file cabinet. But these days we don't do that anymore. And our data is spread out all over the place. You've got some locally, you've got some in cloud applications. And how much do you trust a single cloud vendor to hold that information?

[00:26:57] I mean, let's just take something that's unstructured data like, or that, sorry, that's structured data like Trello. Let's just say Trello, for example. Yeah. I may have a lot of really critical information in Trello that's not in a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet or anything like that. But what happens when Trello just closes its doors? Now, Simone is their own by Atlassian. Hold on. What?

[00:27:27] This happened. One of those, I forget what they were called, but there was a UX design tool website that shut their doors December 31st of last year. And they told everyone December 1st, they're shutting their doors. And everyone had to get their stuff off. And they wrote a documentation. Here's how you export.

[00:27:55] And on their website, it was like, this is the one KB article you're allowed to go to is how to export your stuff. The problem is that it exported flat files and people rushed to get it done and try to upload it to its competitor, which couldn't read the flat files as actual UI files. So basically, it ended up being worthless. Yeah. This happens all the time. And I was about to ask, who backs up Trello?

[00:28:24] I'm going to Google this live. I love doing live time stuff during our show. It makes real good. Of course. How to back up Trello. How do I back up my Trello boards? Oh, so Trello's owned by Atlantia now, right? Yes. So big, stable company. There is a backup for Trello power up. It's a power up. So it's made by a company called Rewind that you can try for free for seven days.

[00:28:54] And it will back up your Trello. The question is, into what? Well, and can you restore it into anything other than Trello? Right. Which is a good point, right? Because you can back up your Trello, and if Trello goes down, now you're left with a backup of gobbledygook. I think, man, I feel like a doomsday person now because I'm just like, all of it's garbage.

[00:29:22] Like, you shouldn't trust the internet. Well, but this, I mean, this is the danger, right? Now, obviously, with large companies like Atlassian, and by the way, we're not picking on Trello for any reason. It just happens to be a program that I was probably in, you know, last, and that's what I'm thinking of. And Microsoft, same way. Like, very stable, very large company. Not really worried about them losing data. But, you know, you change that conversation.

[00:29:52] Well, I think we all know somebody who lost data in Microsoft 365. Now, we don't know if it was Microsoft's fault. Microsoft 362. Or whether it was the user's fault, you know, there's probably questions there. But we know for a fact, like with Google Workspace, that somebody did lose data. An entire company lost data, and Google could not get it back. Yeah.

[00:30:19] And that's very rare. I will say that. But it has happened, which means it has the potential to happen again. I think backups are more like backups are more for user error. I deleted something. I need it back. Than it is for company-wide problematic.

[00:30:46] Not saying that that situation with the client in Google wasn't like it could have been user error that got it. Maybe that got some sort. I don't know. I don't know the story. It could have been like an encryption where or something that like hosed it and whatever. But like this is why you need third-party backup. But that third-party backup needs to be able to read that data like in the raw and be able to put it elsewhere. See, like there's the, you know, we always say like it's not in the backup. It's in the recovery.

[00:31:15] I think it needs to go to another level. And it's like it needs to be in the recovery asterisk. And that asterisk being like can you recover it into something else that's still usable? Right. So like can my, I doubt it, but can like backup if I restore an entire user's mailbox as PDFs or just .emls that I can download? Something that I can read other than trying to shove it back into an account that may or may not be hosed because the provider is down or whatever. Right, right.

[00:31:45] Exactly. Now, I also think that there's another topic that's important to discuss here. And that is what is in your managed service agreement when it comes to backup. Because this is one of those things where if you don't set proper expectations and, you know, it kind of goes to what you were talking about earlier. Words matter, right?

[00:32:07] So the words that you use in your MSA are important when it comes to setting expectations with the client for what they are going to be protected from and what they're going to be able to do in the event one of those incidents takes place. Right. Speaking of the MSA, I mean, our good friend Bradley Groh is, you know, MSA. He writes the MSAs all the time. But he said something once at an event I was at.

[00:32:34] And he said like, he said, day one, the second they sign that MSA, you back up their data. Because like within five seconds, someone deletes something. Guess what? They're sending in a support ticket and you have no idea how to deal with it. Like you have to back up their data. We're picking up a new client tomorrow, hopefully. And like I'm thinking about their email because one of the things they mentioned is that they want to move from Microsoft to Google for whatever reason. And I was like, yeah, we can do that for you. It's not a problem.

[00:33:02] But I was like, we need to back up their stuff first, then migrate and then kill the old backups and set up new ones. Like because these guys are a volatile bunch to start with and I don't want to risk that, you know what I mean, if we do a migration and something eats itself going backwards. Yeah, so I actually got burned one time. Not too badly because I pulled it out in a miraculous way. Totally not due to my skill though.

[00:33:33] First issue I ever had with ransomware. Obviously, this was a while ago and we were in the process of onboarding this client. Suspicion is that the former MSP logged in remotely. We were so early in the onboarding process, we did not know that RDP was open to the world. Okay.

[00:33:55] So logged in, encrypted everything and including the backup, which the backup was simply, you know, Windows server backup to an external drive plugged into the USB. Now, bottom line, we were able to recover shadow copies from the backup, restore enough of the files to get them back up and running. And all of their accounting had just been sent to their accountant.

[00:34:24] And so we were able to restore that from there. So we were able to fully restore them. Right. But because of that situation, all of my agreements going forward included, we do not certify your backup until you are completely onboarded.

[00:34:43] And so that way we were protected from those situations where we had not fully onboarded the client and gotten our backup solution in place and verified that first backup is complete. Right. Now, that is tough. Yeah. Yeah. I can see how that would play out. But again, like, we have situations where we take clients over from other MSPs or other IT providers.

[00:35:10] And like, you know, with the amount of stuff that everyone uses, like OAuth to sign in, all we basically have to do is change their Google account and like call it a day for like 99% of stuff. But like, and then of course, you know, 10, 12 weeks later, someone's like, I'm having a problem with this piece of software you've never heard of. And by the way, the IT administrator, the old IT guy is still in it. The hell, man. You know, like that happens all the time.

[00:35:35] But I think the backup thing, like, the problem with backups is like there's no good solution. There's no one solution for everything. Like you have to backup everything in separate things and it's an insurance game. Yes.

[00:35:58] I mean, it's exactly like insurance because you're paying for it the entire time and the minute you stop paying for it is when something happens and you just. Exactly. So are we just like predetermined to pay for backup just to make sure nothing happens? Like, like I know we talked about this on a previous episode. Like you don't sell backup. You don't sell cybersecurity. You're selling solutions. Yeah.

[00:36:23] Am I, is my solution just like luck and best wishes that nothing's going to happen because I'm paying for your backup. Right. Cause like truth be told, the roulette wheel has landed six times on black. That next time every human being is like, it's gotta be red. It's gotta be red. Guess what? It doesn't. That's not how that game plays. So the bottom line here is don't gamble with your data and definitely don't gamble with your client's data.

[00:36:53] I like how you wrap that up with a bow. Check us out. Facebook.com slash group slash all things MSP. Let us know how you're backing up your client's data. And when was the last time you tried restoring it? Also, if anyone has a lead on this scale pad product, shoot me a DM. I want to know about it. Follow us at youtube.com slash at all things MSP. See Eric in his weirdly spooky lights for February. I don't get it. We're on all, we're on the podcasting tools. You know all this, but do leave a review. I want to see some more reviews from you guys.

[00:37:23] I'd love hearing from you. Thanks so much for all, for the people who have been reaching out the last couple of weeks. I do appreciate that as much. Really like it. I love being part of this community. Eric, anything before we say goodbye to the folks at home? Yeah, just that, you know, by the time this episode drops, we will have had our 100th episode. And, you know, really appreciate everybody who has been part of this journey. And, you know, we're looking forward to 100 more.

[00:37:53] He is. I'm kidding. I love it here, man, because you do all the work. I just yap for 30 minutes and then you have to, like, make me see. Thank you for listening or watching the All Things MSP podcast. If you liked this episode, go ahead and give us a thumbs up. Hit that like button and consider subscribing to catch all our weekly episodes.

[00:38:19] And from your host extraordinaire, Justin Eskar, and myself, Eric Anthony, your humble producer and All Things MSP founder, thank you very much for spending your time with us. If you are not aware, All Things MSP started as a Facebook group and now supports over 6,000 members. We also have a LinkedIn page for those of you who don't do Facebook. And make sure to check out our YouTube channel for even more content. A special thank you to our elite sponsor, CoreView,

[00:38:46] helping you manage your Microsoft 365 tenants instead of them managing you. Thank you to our premier sponsors, EasyDMark, Helped, Gozinta, Movebot, and SuperOps. And thank you to the rest of our sponsors. Without sponsors, we could not do what we do for the MSP community. Please consider checking them out. The All Things MSP podcast is a BizPow LLC production. The views and opinions of the hosts and guests are their own

[00:39:14] and do not reflect the thoughts and opinions of any employer, vendor, sponsor, or random taxi driver in the Metro DC area. Be sure to join us next week for another exciting episode. Thank you.