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Publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Publication Date 2007-01-03
Paperback - 760 Pages
ISBN 0596102461
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)
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)
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)
Packed with practical, affordable 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 our strong-selling Unix Backup & Recovery by the same author, now revised and expanded with over 40% new material.
Backup & Recovery gives you a complete overview of systems utilities that are included with most operating systems -- such as tar, dump, cpio, and the ntbackup utility -- and details the most popular freely available utilities that can automate essential processes: Amanda, backuppc, bacula, and rsync with snapshots. Advanced recovery and administration techniques are included for specific hardware and software environments, including SQL Server, Exchange Server, and the Oracle, Postgres and MySQL databases. For environments of all sizes and budgets, this unique book shows you how to ensure data protection without running to expensive consultants or resorting to commercial solutions.
This book’s does not only teaches you have to create safe backup but it takes you to the next level where a large organization can save tons of dollars a year by making their backup and restore faster and more reliable process.
Detail Summary:
Backup and Recovery is the most interesting subject to me. I have always enjoyed reading and writing about this subject. I personally believe that without proper backup and ability to restore the backup to recover the system to original state, any organization is at great risk. Biggest change in the recent industry has been the proliferation of Windows, Exchange and SQL Server.
This book is aimed at the people who feel that the commercial software precuts aren’t meeting all their needs. Almost everything which is discussed in this book is either included with operating system or application. This book vastly covers the tools which are open-source projects. This book covers how to back up and recover everything from a basic Linux, Windows, or Max OS workstation to a complicated DB2, Oracle, Sybase or SQL Server (my favorite) databases as well many other things.
This book suggests tools which are less than $100 or in most of the cases almost free. This book is for every developer or system administrator. This book tells users how exactly to choose which backup tool is best. This book stays away from ever changing product names. It focuses on concepts only - what a novel approach! I appreciate author for the same.
This book focuses on two people mainly - Database Administrators (DBA) and System Administrator (SA). Concepts for both the roles are explained in detail in this book. In author’s own word "I explained the backup utilities in plain language so that any DBA can understand them, and I explain database architecture in such a way that an SA, even one who has never before seen a database, can understand it."
A book on Backup and Recovery are incomplete without discussing Bare-Metal Recovery. When operating system disk is lost and it is needed to recovered, it is called Bare-Metal Recovery. Out of hundreds of way to recover, this book focuses on best ways for Bare-Metal Recovery.
Working as SQL Server Principal Database Administrator, I have been involved with Database Backup since day one. In several years of my career, I have seen many large organizations ignoring backup of master database. I was very glad when I see in just three lines author has conveyed clear message about master database. These three lines explain the understanding of author for SQL Server.
"It is extremely important to backup the master database on regular basis. This database holds all the configuration information for the running system as well as all the configuration information for all databases and other information such as logon accounts. Without this database, the rest of the system is useless!"
Rating: 4 and 1/2 stars
In Summary, Backup and Recovery is not everything. This book takes you to highest level of the backup and recovery at conceptually strong working examples.
Pinal Dave
Principal Database Administrator
(blog.sqlauthority.com)
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.
The author starts out by discussing "The Philosophy of Backup" which covers why backups are so important and how you to find a solution that both meets your needs and your budget. Chapter two goes over what to backup, how often and at what levels. It also discussed what types of disaster to be prepared for, automation, storage, testing and things to look out for on various OS’s.
Chapters 3-7 cover open-source backup utilities. In chapter three the author discusses and provides examples of how to use basic utilities such as dump, cpio, tar and dd for Unix systems, ntbackup and System Restore for the Window’s crowd, ditto for Mac, and the GNU versions of tar, cpio, and rsync. Chapter’s 4-6 discuss Amanda, BackupPC and Bacula. Chapter seven digs into near-continuous data protection and how the open-source community is achieving this, and what tools to use.
By chapter 8 and 9 the author is discussing commercial backup solutions. This section is different from the last in that it doesn’t really discuss specific tools and how to use them, but rather it discusses the features of commercial products. This section also covers the various types of backup hardware on the market in an effort to help the reader decide what media best meets their needs.
Chapters 10-14 covers "Bare-Metal Recovery". The author takes you through the process of a bare-metal recovery with Solaris, Linux, Windows, HP-UX, AIX, and Mac OS X.
By chapters 15-22 the author has moved on to database backups and takes you through the various solutions for Oracle, Sybase, IBM DB2, SQL Server, Exchange, PostegreSQL, and MySQL. Finally the author wraps up the book with VMware server backup solutions and discussing data protection.
CONCLUSION
--
I found this book to be a very interesting read. I especially enjoyed the open-source, bare-metal recovery, and database sections. The author does an excellent job of taking the reader through all of the steps including example syntax needed to perform a backup and restore with the various tools discussed. Another high point is that the author includes current tools and techniques. This book holds lots of real world wisdom and I would recommend it to any system administrator, developer, or user who is interested in protecting their data.
If you ever are faced with a technical problem in your IT career, turn to O’Reilly publications and pick a book on the topic. The cover of this book fully describes its content: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems.
I was recently faced with the task of backing up MySQL databases, along with setting up reliable backup tools on client’s Linux server and Windows workstations. The book helped me find all the answers; it’s filled with good and practical information and is supplemented with a "healthy doze" of real life examples and anecdotes.
A good number of backup tools are discussed along with configuration examples and automation procedures. Oracle, HP-UX, Windows, Linux... All you need is here.
If you ever are faced with a technical problem in your IT career, turn to O’Reilly publications and pick a book on the topic. The cover of this book fully describes its content: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems.
I was recently faced with the task of backing up MySQL databases, along with setting up reliable backup tools on client’s Linux server and Windows workstations. The book helped me find all the answers; it’s filled with good and practical information and is supplemented with a "healthy doze" of real life examples and anecdotes.
A good number of backup tools are discussed along with configuration examples and automation procedures. Oracle, HP-UX, Windows, Linux... All you need is here.
For me the updated Linux/Unix coverage was very welcome. The well organized and accessible content had immediate application myself and a client. Beyond accessibility there is also enough depth to out of trouble and with lots of references points you to sources for details beyond the context of the book.
A great book on backup made even better.
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