Backup and Recovery

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 760 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. January 3, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596102461
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596102463
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 2.2 pounds

Product Description
Packed with practical, freely available backup and recovery solutions for Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X systems -- as well as various databases -- this new guide is a complete overhaul of Unix Backup & Recovery by the same author, now revised and expanded with over 75% new material.

Backup & Recovery starts with a complete overview of backup philosophy and design, including the basic backup utilities of tar, dump, cpio, ntbackup, ditto, and rsync. It then explains several open source backup products that automate backups using those utilities, including AMANDA, Bacula, BackupPC, rdiff-backup, and rsnapshot. Backup & Recovery then explains how to perform bare metal recovery of AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, VMWare, & Windows systems using freely-available utilities. The book also provides overviews of the current state of the commercial backup software and hardware market, including overviews of CDP, Data De-duplication, D2D2T, and VTL technology. Finally, it covers how to automate the backups of DB2, Exchange, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL-Server, and Sybase databases - without purchasing a commercial backup product to do so.

For environments of all sizes and budgets, this unique book shows you how to ensure data protection without resorting to expensive commercial solutions. You will soon learn to:

• Automate the backup of popular databases without a commercial utility
• Perform bare metal recovery of any popular open systems platform, including your PC or laptop
• Utilize valuable but often unknown open source backup products
• Understand the state of commercial backup software, including explanations of CDP and data de-duplication software
• Access the current state of backup hardware, including Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs)

About The Author
W. Curtis Preston has specialized in designing data protection systems since 1993, and has designed such systems for many environments, both large and small. His lively prose and wry, real-world approach has made him a popular author and speaker.

Reader Reviews
W. Curtis Preston is the king of backups, and his book Backup and Recovery (BAR) is easily the best book available on the subject. Preston makes many good decisions in this book, covering open source projects and considerations for commercial solutions. Tool discussions are accompanied by sound advice and plenty of short war stories. If the author addresses the few concerns I have in his next edition, that should be a five star book. The best aspect of BAR is the author's obvious expertise in this subject. He does a good job sharing lots of his knowledge with the reader. Probably the most valuable conceptual framework I learned in BAR is the difference between backups and archives. Pages 696-7 summarize this nicely: "Backups are the secondary copy of primary data... Archives are the primary copy of secondary data." In this section and elsewhere, Preston describes how archives are the repository one should create when answering ediscovery requests and similar queries -- not backups. This is an extremely powerful idea and I plan to see how my employer deals with this issue. The second best aspect of BAR involves multiple chapters on backing up various databases. One can usually find similar coverage in single books on specific databases, but having all information in one book is useful for purposes of comparison. Chapter 15 provides an overview of the entire problem by discussing terminology and features found in many databases. This chapter helps storage admins understand the database admin world. Of particular note was the coverage of Microsoft Exchange, which the book calls a specialized database. I had not thought of Exchange in this light, but it's true -- especially when Microsoft indicates future versions will have SQL Server replacing Extensible Storage Engine. I only read chapters on SQL Server, Exchange, and MySQL. The third best aspect of BAR includes OS-specific chapters on bare-metal recovery. Although my OS of choice (FreeBSD) didn't merit its own chapter, I felt the material in the bare-metal section was robust enough to help me perform this work if necessary. I really only read the chapters on Windows/Linux and ignored Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Mac OS X. BAR is a good book, so why not five stars? First, I thought the chapters on open source backup options (especially ch 7 on "Open-Source Near CDP") were weak. I wanted to learn a lot more about rdiff-backup, for example, but the tool merited about 5 pages and introduced only the simplest possible invocation. Rsnapshot was also undercovered. It seemed like too many pages were spent on utilities I would probably never use (given newer options) like dump and cpio. I was also not confident I could get very far with Amanda, BackupPC, or Bacula given the detail given to each open source product. (Regarding BackupPC -- I had to guess it was open source and then only found out the truth when its Web site at sf.net was mentioned late in the chapter!) Second, some topics never really made sense. For example, I still do not understand how snapshots actually work. Calling it a "picture" means nothing to me. Snapshots are mentioned throughout the text, and the explanation that finally appears near the end of the book in a miscellanea chapter doesn't help. Third, I would really have liked to hear more about services offering backup to the Internet, like Amazon's S3 and others. This MUST be covered in the next edition. Finally, although the book has lots of advice, it would have been nice to have had a case study chapter where multiple example enterprises demonstrate their backup and recovery solutions. After finishing the book I have lots of ideas floating around, but seeing how a one-person, 100-person, 10,000-person, and 500,000-person environment implement BAR would be greatly appreciated.