Book details of 'Unix Backup & Recovery'

Title	Unix Backup & Recovery
Author(s)	W. Curtis Preston, Gigi Estabrook
ISBN	1565926420
Language	English
Published	December 1999
Publisher	O'Reilly & Associates

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virtualbookcase.com score: 5.0   Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Unix Backup & Recovery':

Reviewer Koos van den Hout wrote:
A good book on backups, written with experience in the matter. Deals with the most important part of backups: being able to succesfully restore data and recover systems. The book also handles the difficult area of backups of databases very well, with samples of scripts for backing up most commercial rdbms systems and information on the care and feeding of a big rdbms. Handles baremetal recovery (starting from scratch with a full backup tape and an empty harddisk) and things like selecting the right backup software. This is almost required reading for system administrators of Unix setups (from one to many servers) but I would also recommend it to advanced home users who run Unix in some variant (Linux) at home. A good book!
Reviewer amazon.co.uk wrote:
As the somewhat bitter joke has it, backups are too boring and expensive to bother about: only restores are important. In practice, backups are a business necessity like liability insurance. And, like insurance, it's important to get it right. This is where Curtis Preston's UNIX Backup and Recovery dazzles. His enthusiasm for the subject shines from the pages. His primary concerns are heavy-duty business UNIX systems and the corporate databases they run, but he starts you off easy with the basics of tar, dump, cpio and other UNIX system utilities. You get discussions of disaster scenarios, planning, media types, native and commercial utilities and endless gotchas--those situations where life irritatingly fails to follow the theoretical models. The strength of the book, though, is the sheer quantity of practical advice from someone who has clearly been there. This includes a supporting Web site with scripts, discussion, a mailing list and real life experiences. This experience extends to new breeds of file system, the relational databases that rely on them and strategies for securing them. The section describing the logical and physical structures of databases such as Informix and Oracle are worth the price of the book on their own. UNIX Backup and Recovery deserves to be a standard work for anyone whose job depends on data integrity.
Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
he Unix file system is reliable and very well-suited to mission-critical applications in which maximum uptime is key. But it's not flawless, and that's where Unix Backup & Recovery comes in. This book details dozens of strategies for keeping Unix systems online. The strategies range from good administration practices that minimize problems to hot-restore techniques that allow you to recover from breaks as seamlessly as possible. The book also contains absolutely inclusive archive techniques that allow you to restore huge databases and file systems from backup media. Unix Backup & Recovery includes a lot of general "recommended practices" advice and lots of scary stories about lost files (and more than a few about heroic system administrators who saved the day, or at least the data). But it gets down to brass tacks too, documenting lots of backup and recovery tools that can make the administrator's job much easier when they're used properly (including cpio, tar, and AMANDA). Coverage of specific systems' backup and recovery issues (including those of Solaris, HP-UX, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix) are invaluable, as is the coverage of techniques for extracting information from ancient, obsolete backup media. The point: read this book before you have a disaster, so you can do everything required to head one off and be ready to deal with problems when they happen.
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