Backup & Recovery book now shipping

Backup & Recovery, the long awaited follow up to the very popular Unix Backup & Recovery, shipped today, Jan 5th.  Order your copy now!

It's actually a second book, not a second edition, as far more than the title has changed.  The scope of the book has significantly changed, as it now includes Windows, Mac OS X, Exchange, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DB2. The book contains over 75% new material. 

Here's what the back cover has to say:

Backup and Recovery offers a comprehensive approach to the challenges you face in backing up your data. It provides hands-on, practical, and straightforward instructions and advice for backing up and recovering vital systems—without resorting to commercial backup software. It covers everything from a basic Linux, Windows, or Mac OS workstation to a complicated DB2, Oracle, or Sybase database—and a lot of things in between.  Backup and Recovery helps you develop a philosophy of backup and describes schedule backups for optimum effectiveness and coverage. You’ll see that backup is just part of a larger topic of data protection.

Highlights of Backup and Recovery include:

  • Basic backup tools, including dump, tar, cpio, ditto, dd, ntbackup,and rsync
  • Coverage of open-source backup tools including Amanda, BackupPC, and Bacula
  • How to achieve near continuous data protection using open source tools such as rsync,  rsnapshot, and rdiff-backup
  • A step-by-step approach to bare-metal recovery of Windows, Linux, Mac OS, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris systems (it’s not as hard as you think)
  • How to back up and recover Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Exchange, whether you’re a sysadmin or a DBA
  • How to back up and recover VMware systems
  • Criteria for How to evaluating commercial solutions and backup hardware and for determineing whether open source solutions can meet your needs, as well as how to select a commercial backup software product if necessary
  • Criteria for evaluating all types of backup hardware, including tape, optical, and disk-based targets such as virtual tape libraries (VTLs)
  • A step-by-step approach to bare-metal recovery of Windows, Linux, Mac OS, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris systems (it’s not as hard as you think)
  • Why disk is becoming the most important backup media—especially for smaller shops
  • It’s not just about the tools: Backup and Recovery is full of practical lessons,  tricks, and tools to help you solve backup and recover problems of any size.

Whether your budget barely stretches to cover the cost of the backup media or allows you to buy a silo bigger than your house, this book has something for you.  No matter how small or large your shop—even if you have almost no budget to work with—Backup and Recovery will help you formulate a practical backup and recovery strategy that meets your needs. 

“W. Curtis Preston is the most knowledgeable person I know about backup and recovery. Not only does he know his stuff but he has a unique knack of making such a complex subject interesting and understandable. Read his book: I guarantee, you'll learn something — make that a lot of things.”

Rich Friedman,  Features Editor,  Storage magazine

Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data