Backup & Recovery

by W. Curtis Preston

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)

Genres: Computer Science, Reference

758 pages, Paperback

First published January 3, 2007

Reviews

[SY77 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first edition, the one from 2006, in 2022. A lot of the content is of reference type, naturally it was very outdated. Still it was a fun read. I read this to have a slightly deeper understanding of backups, archives and data protection. A lot of good general advice, and some practical recipes too. (I skipped over the database chapters as that is probably too much outdated for today).

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a quite old introduction to backup processes but is still good from architectural and theoretical points of view. Most of the practical part may be omitted now, but it worth read at least first and last parts of the book to understand how to design backup and recovery processes

[Sterling Hooten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better for philosophy and conceptual distinction than particular tools.

Emphasize recovery, design multiple solutions, keep it simple, back up everything.

[Jeffrey]

Scary book.

[Christian Pajimola]

let me read first