Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems [Paperback]

W. Curtis Preston is the king of backups, and his book Backup and Recovery (BAR) is easily the best book available on the subject. Preston makes many good decisions in this book, covering open source projects and considerations for commercial solutions. Tool discussions are accompanied by sound advice and plenty of short war stories. If the author addresses the few concerns I have in his next edition, that should be a five star book.

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.

This version updates the 7 year old predecessor. The previous book was very good and widely respected in the UNIX and Linux community. Now Preston has expanded the coverage to include windows and MacIntosh OS-X - of interest to many enterprises with heterogenious environments.

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.

When I picked up this text, I kind of expected it to be a bit sparse in some areas. After all, it's an ambitious book. With individual chapters on every database from DB2, Oracle and Sybase to MySQL, Postgres and SQL Server. In addition he also covers OS backups on Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and Mac OS X.

Preston though, succeeds, and succeeds with flying colors. What I was struck by most of all, after reading it, is his clear breadth of knowledge in the subject of backups. Each of the different databases alone do things differently, and have a lot of different concepts, and vernacular to describe it.

He starts the book with the basics, what backing up is all about, why you do it, and what to consider. What are you backing up and why? How often, and using what method? Roll-your-own solution scripting with unix utils like dd, cpio, or tar, go with an open source solution such as Amanda, Bacula, or BackupPC, or consider various commercial solutions. And lastly, don't forget testing and verifying your backups. Preston doesn't let anything through the cracks.

I have worked on Unix for years and years, but my sweet spot is working with databases. So I read the chapters on Oracle and MySQL very carefully. In both cases I learned something new. For instance during an Oracle hotbackup, did you know that changes to datafiles are *NOT* frozen. Learn how Oracle reconstructs your data using a hotbackup, by reading his careful discussion on the topic. Databases are not simple beasts, and the backup considerations are not trivial. Nonetheless, I would recommend this book as your reference for doing database backups on any of these platforms.

Lastly I like the writing style. He calls it "champagne backup on a beer budget". Good stuff. You'll find this book interesting to read, full of detail when you need it and pointed when necessary. Go pickup a copy.