Unix Backup & Recovery +CD - Softcover

Preston, W Curtis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565926420 ISBN 13: 9781565926424

Publisher: O′Reilly, 1999

Synopsis

Unix Backup & Recovery provides a complete overview of all facets of Unix backup and recovery, and offers practical, affordable backup and recovery solutions for environments of all sizes and budgets. The book begins with detailed explanations of the native backup utilities available to the Unix administrator, and ends with practical advice on choosing a commercial backup utility.This book:

• Describes the features, limitations, and syntax of Unix backup and restore utilities,(including dump, tar, cpio, dd, GNUtar, and GNUcpio) for many popular versions of Unix, including AIX, Compaq Unix, HP-UX, IRIX, SCO, Solaris, and Linux
• Provides instructions for installing and configuring freely available backup systems such as AMANDA
• Includes ready-to-run shell scripts that automate live backups of Informix, Oracle, and Sybase databases
• Presents step-by-step recovery procedures for Oracle, Informix, and Sybase
• Presents step-by-step "bare-metal" disaster recovery procedures for AIX, Compaq Unix, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, and Linux
• Describes the design of "disaster recovery" and "highly available" systems
• Provides guidance on choosing a commercial backup and recovery system
• Describes the features and limitations of backup hardware

About this title

Review

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. --Steve Patient

Review

"In conclusion, this is a reference, that is so profoundly useful that you should start to use it routinely to underpin knowledge in yur day-to-day work. Before I read this book I only considered three manuals as key personal references to be kept close to hand at all times (all of them "O'Reillys"). They were: Practical UNIX and Internet Security by Garfinkel, Spafford and Schwartz, TCP/IP Network Administration by Hunt and Essential System Administration by Frisch I now have a fourth to add to this list. Wherever I go, whatever systems I end up administering, these four books will be nearby. I urge you to do the same." - Steven-Ashley Woltering, Ping (HP User Group Technical Journal), May

Edition details

• Publisher: O′Reilly
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565926420
• ISBN 13: 9781565926424
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 736