Review of Curtis Preston's UNIX Backup and Recovery

By Albert Menchaca, amenchaca@texoma.net

Curtis Preston's UNIX Backup and Recovery is a great read for all levels of systems administration. It's well-organized and presents a variety of suggestions and cases for performing backups. The book is separated into six sections with several chapters in each section. I appreciate this layout because it allows the reader to hone in on areas specific to the user's environment. The introduction offers a sound foundation for developing backup philosophies including disaster recovery planning. As with any backup plan organization, documentation, and testing are the key elements of good data management. Preston does a fine job presenting these practices.

Section two covers backup and recovery tools native to the user's operating system as well as other freeware. He discusses AMANDA (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) in more detail including installation and configuration. Section three examines commercial backup and recovery tools including suggestions for selecting the right tools and features. A good backup software RFI questionnaire is referenced in Chapter 5 as well as in the CRDOM that comes with the book. Section Four outlines backup and recovery methods using native tools found in several operating systems including Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and AIX. This is very helpful if your shop has a limited budget and you have to make the best out of operating systems tools available. Solaris is the predominate OS that is discussed in this chapter.

Section Five is my favorite because it covers database backups. If you're not familiar with the basics of database failures. backups, and restores, the first chapter in this section offers a good overview. The subsequent chapters separately discuss backup and recovery for Oracle, Sybase, and Informix including additional scripts and guide- lines provided in the CDROM. Section six closes with Backup and Recovery Potpourri. Since this book was published in 1999, some of the information provided in this section (such as backup hardware) may be dated. However, it remains a good source of background information.

UNIX Backup and Recovery is about 650 pages long but it was easy to read and remains good reference material. Although I would recommend this book to all UNIX systems and database administrators, I would make this required reading for all junior administrators.