Backup & Ransomware Recovery

Overview

Two different things get bought here and they are constantly confused. Backup SOFTWARE schedules, catalogues, deduplicates, verifies and restores; the immutable STORAGE TARGET it writes to is what actually stops a compromised administrator — or the backup product's own service account — from deleting the copies. Immutability is usually S3 Object Lock, in one of two retention modes: governance, which a privileged caller holding the bypass permission can override, and compliance, which nobody can override until the retention date passes (on AWS, not even the account root). Purpose-built appliances add a physical or logical air gap on top, and some — ExaGrid's Retention Time-Lock, for one — use delayed deletes rather than Object Lock at all, which is a materially weaker guarantee that reads the same in a datasheet. The discipline the whole area serves is 3-2-1-1-0: three copies, on two media, one off-site, one offline or immutable, and zero errors on a restore you actually tested. Cyber-resilience features (anomaly detection, threat scanning of backups) now differentiate vendors. Priced by protected capacity, workloads, or sockets. A core control for business continuity.

Last line of defense against ransomware; a survival-grade control.

Advantages

• Veeam broad and cost-effective
• Rubrik/Cohesity immutable and ransomware-aware
• Restic/Borg free
• Object Lock compliance mode holds against a compromised administrator, and the immutable target can be commodity S3 rather than a premium SKU
• 3-2-1-1-0 gives the programme a testable definition of done
• the last line against ransomware.

Trade-offs

• Capacity-based cost grows
• recovery testing is often neglected (backups are not recovery)
• immutability config matters — governance mode is bypassable by design, and 'immutable' in a datasheet may mean a 30-day delayed delete
• compliance-mode retention cannot be shortened, so a mis-set policy bills you for years of data you are not allowed to delete
• the cheap-egress clouds price restores differently from ingest, and the cap bites exactly during a full recovery
• egress fees.

Open-source option

Open source covers the backup SOFTWARE half well — Bacula, Bareos, Restic and Borg are all real, and Restic and Borg have genuine append-only repository modes. It no longer covers the immutable STORAGE TARGET half. Bareos documents no S3 Object Lock support at all (its immutability story is WORM tape and air gap), Amanda has none, and MinIO — the canonical open-source S3 target with Object Lock — archived its AGPLv3 server on 2026-04-24 and now sells the commercial AIStor line instead. In every open-source combination the immutability lives in the storage layer, and that layer's free implementation is the piece that just went away.

Vendors & tools in this area

Last updated 2026-09-28 · Next refresh 2026-10-26 (weekly) · Changelog