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

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 16 Ratings

The Computer Backup Book - 2003-10-20
Reviewer Rating:
This is *THE* Computer System backup book. It contains all the basics of why you want to backup computer systems, plus many of the real world experience details. It is written from a Unix perspective, but is still applicable to Windows and other non-Unix environments.

I've been using this book as a general guide for several years now. It was a book I watched work it's way through the O'Reilly system from first announcement to general release. I bought it when it first came out. I have not been disappointed in it.

Many people think of computer system backups as a dry old musty topic of interest to nobody in particular. But 9/11 showed how important good disaster recovery planning and procedures could be to a business.

Some of the specifics are now a little out of date, but not by leaps and bounds. It is still very good for its core reason for being - Backups. It is very much less out of date than other computer books on the market today.

I have been dealing with large-scale computer system backups and disaster recovery for large employers for years... and I still consult this book regularly to make sure have not missed anything important. It covers all the topics you need.

Best book on BR - 2007-03-09
Reviewer Rating:
This book is important for System Administrators and DBAs. The book is well-written and have discussed all the major UNIX flavors back and recovery. The author went further by discussing the Backup and Recovery of major databases on these UNIX operating systems.
I give 5 stars.

Definitive guide to Backups - 2005-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
As a former Unix system administrator, this book proved invaluable to me. Backups are a dreaded responsibility for most as they are not glamorous, but when a backup is needed, the administrator can become a hero or out of a job very quickly depending on thier backups. The author provides some deep insight into the art of backups, drawing upon real world examples that provide insight into the recommendations. The authors quips on real world backup stories is worth the price alone as there is great knowledge to be gained from someone else's mistakes and failures. Truly a gem that should be on EVERY system administrators bookshelf.

disappointing - 2005-01-25
Reviewer Rating:
This is the first of the O'Reilly books I have been disappointed in. I bought the book for one reason-- to find out how to restore a / and /usr file system off a remote tape drive. Unfortunately the book does not answer this question, all of its examples assume the server has a local tape drive attached. The authors spend their time touting freebie utilities at the expense of a thourough discussion of the backup and restore capabilities that come with the operating system.

I had almost no experience with *nix - 2003-06-16
Reviewer Rating:
Even though I was still very new to Linux/UNIX, this book was able to help me create a fully automated backup routine as well as how to restore from those backups. I found the book very easy to read and not at all dry.

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