Topics:

-This week we have the pleasure of sitting down with Richard Wingfield, owner and Head Geek at Envision Design based in Houston, TX

-Richard is a frequent contributor to the show, not just on air but behind the scenes in frequent communications with the hosts

-After taking the time to emotionally recover, he is ready to share a personal story of data loss with a long time customer.

-Envision Design has minimum requirements for a Synology: + system, 4 bay or more, that support Btrfs (https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/Btrfs), which supports roll backs

-Their company keeps an offsite data center in Austin, TX where they can provide redundant backups for their customers. It is out of the flood zone and drivable to quickly access their data.

-Costs for offsite backup are higher than the large companies like CrashPlan or Backblaze but the personal service and quick turnaround is a compelling sales pitch

-Richard describes some of the options he presents to his clients for data redundancy and backup. He now requires a level of minimal redundancy that he will not budge on.

-Richard’s story is of a drive failure that went horribly wrong. This was initially due to a software bug that was compounded by human error.

-As Richard takes us through this, we find there was a software bug with DSM 6 that began syncing local deletions on their Synology to their offsite copy. Since the client did not want to spend money, they opted for a sync solution on the archive server as opposed to any kind of versioning.

-They relied on Drive Savers to restore data. Unfortunately, after a couple of months of working on it, all of the header information was missing so they received a bunch of files without names or metadata.

-All totaled, the burden of cost was placed on Envision Design and ended up costing them upwards of around $12,000.

-With all this talk of data restoration, Jerry recalls a story of working with Drive Savers and a rescinded commission

-Envision Design sticks with all Iron Wolf drives to populate their Synology devices with. One of the benefits of additional health data if you go with 4 TB or greater.

-Bonding multiple NICs is another benefit that Richard’s team takes advantage of.

-Cost of downtime is a language that most clients will understand when helping them decide on budget

-Sam is eager to look into off-site backup storage as another area of recurring revenue