Unix Backup and Recovery

This book is divided into six parts: Part I, Introduction This part of this book contains just enough information to whet your backup and recovery appetite. Chapter 1, Preparing for the Worst, contains the six steps that you must go through to create and maintain a disaster recovery plan, one part of which will be a good backup and recovery system. Chapter 2, Backing It All Up, goes into detail about the essential elements of a good backup and recovery system. Part II, Freely Available Filesystem Backup & Recovery Utilities This section covers the freely available utilities that you can use to back up your systems if you can't afford a commercial backup package. Chapter 3, Native Backup & Recovery Utilities, covers Unix's native backup and recovery utilities in detail, including dump, tar, GNU tar, cpio, GNU cpio, and dd. Chapter 4, Free Backup Utilities, starts with some simple tools to assist you in your backups, and contains a complete overview of the popular AMANDA utility, which is used to back up many small to medium-sized Unix installations around the world. Part III, Commercial Filesystem Backup & Recovery Utilities If you have outgrown the capabilities of free utilities, or would just like to take advantage of new backup and recovery technologies, you'll need to look at a commercial product. Chapter 5, Commercial Backup Utilities, is your guide to the hundreds of features available in the over 50 commercial backup products available on the market today, allowing you to make an educated purchase decision. Page xvii Chapter 6, High Availability, details how, when backups just aren't fast enough, a high availability system is designed to keep you from ever needing to use your backups. Part IV, Bare-Metal Backup & Recovery Methods A bare-metal recovery is the fastest way to bring a dead system back to life, even if its root drive is completely destroyed. Chapter 7, SunOS/Solaris, contains an in-depth description of the "homegrown" bare-metal recovery procedure that can also be used to back up Linux, Compaq, HP-UX, and IRIX, as well as a detailed Solaris-based example of bare-metal recovery. Chapter 8, Linux, detail how you can perform a bare-metal recovery of a Linux system with a floppy, a backup device, pax, and lilo. Chapter 9, Compaq True-64 Unix, covers both Compaq True-64 Unix's bare-metal recovery tool and the Compaq version of the homegrown procedure covered in Chapter 7. Chapter 10, HP-UX, covers the make_recovery tool, which now comes with HP-UX to perform bare-metal recoveries, along with the HP version of the homegrown procedure. Chapter 11, IRIX, explains how the different versions of IRIX's Backup and Restore scripts work, as well as the IRIX version of the homegrown procedure. Chapter 12, AIX, discusses AIX, a procedure that does not support the homegrown procedure discussed in Chapter 7, but does use mksysb, probably one of the oldest and best-known bare-metal recovery tools. Part V, Database Backup & Recovery This section explains in plain language an area that presents some of the greatest backup and recovery challenges that a system administrator or database administrator will face-backing up and recovering databases. Chapter 13, Backing Up Databases, is a chapter that will be your friend if you're an SA who's afraid of databases or a DBA learning a new database. It explains database architecture in plain language, while relating each architectural element to the appropriate term in Informix, Oracle, and Sybase. Chapter 14, Informix Backup & Recovery, explains both the older ontape and the newer onbar, after which it provides a logically flowcharted recovery procedure that can be used with either utility. Page xviii Chapter 15, Oracle Backup & Recovery, explains how to perform Oracle hot backups whether you are using Oracle's native utilities, EBU, or RMAN, and then provides a detailed flowchart guiding you through even a difficult recovery. Chapter 16, Sybase Backup & Recovery, shows exactly how to use the Backup Server utility, including another flow chart to guide you through Sybase recoveries. Part VI, Backup & Recovery Potpourri The information contained in this part of the book is by no means unimportant; it simply wouldn't fit anywhere else! Chapter 17, ClearCase Backup & Recovery, explains in detail the unique backup and recovery challenges presented by ClearCase. Chapter 18, Backup Hardware, explains the many different types of backup hardware available today, as well as providing criteria that you may use to decide which type of backup drive is right for you. Chapter 19, Miscellanea, covers everything from the oft-debated "live filesystem dumps" question to a few jokes that I found about backup and recovery!