The Backup Book: Disaster Recovery from Desktop to Data Center [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Dorian Cougias (Author), E. L. Heiberger (Author), Karsten Koop (Author) "Let's break down the above sentence into its constituent parts..." (more)
Key Phrases: directory harvest attack, open file backup, diff area, Recovery Bin, Storage Replicator, Active Directory (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Absolutely the best book ever written about keeping your data secure." -- Cihan Cobanoglu, Ph.D., assistant professor of information technology, University of Delaware

"An invaluable tool designed to help professionals keep their secured data available." -- Scott Petry, vice president of products and engineering, Postini, Inc.

"It has been a joy reading your book. This will be my new go-to guide for backup and recovery." -- Wyatt Banks, security systems engineer, Pacific Northwest, Los Angeles

"Reading this book will save you and your company a lot of money in disaster avoidance." -- Mitch Krayton, Digital Resources *1stKIOSK

"The Backup Book is an invaluable tool designed to help professionals keep their secured data available." -- Scott Petry, vice-president of products and engineering, Postini, Inc.

"This book is an essential reference for anyone interested in storage technology." -- Mark Hurlow, president, FWB Software

"This book is one of the most important survival guides any IT person will ever buy." -- Jerry Pape, founder, Excalibur Software Production and Testing

Product Description
Detailing what can go wrong in backup and recovery and how this applies to the various backup methods available, this book couples that information with recovery and business continuity tactics played out over the backdrop of various real-world scenarios. Covered is how freezes, corruption, and loss affects documents, equipment, and day-to-day business activities, and the cost of downtime and job re-creation is explained in a way that builds the best budget for availability, backup, and recovery. Protection and restoration of user data and from various locations and times is also covered, as well as how to keep a business running after a power failure, network failure, or other unforeseen event.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 725 pages
• Publisher: Schaser-Vartan Books; 3rd edition (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972903909
• ISBN-13: 978-0972903905
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #515,804 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Still doesn't fully cover the topic of backup and recovery, May 31, 2005

By	Maxim Masiutin (Chisinau, Republic of Moldova) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The book starts with an educative chapter of how disastrous various data losses can be, and how to calculate the costs of these losses. Then it analyzes ways of protection from different failures at various levels: documents, applications, OS, Storage, CPUs, network, power and building.

Throughout the book there are references to various products and services of different vendors. When the author recommends certain software, there are attempts to suit three operating systems: Windows, OS X and UNIX.

In the chapter about storage corruption, there is an interesting section about SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). I personally use SMART to monitor temperature of my HDDs. But I've found an inaccuracy in the description of the differences between SCSII and IDE. The author claims that "OS just says to SCSII 'Give me a file', and SCSII delivers it, whereas with IDE the OS deals with fragmentation of files". This is incorrect. SCSII doesn't' work on file level, and OS deals with fragmentation at SCSII as well.

The information in this book corresponds year 2000 approximately, it mentions IDE size limit of 137GB and speed limit of 33 MBps (Ultra DMA Mode 2).

The drawback of this book is lack of coverage of collaboration tools like CVS or Subversion as very efficient backup tools. These tools are very easy to use at client side, although their server side is somewhat difficult to install.

The intended audience of the book is very broad, and the style is very simple so even a computer novice can understand this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for Business and Technology Pros, January 21, 2004

By	Father Time NY (Holbrook, NY USA) - See all my reviews

The Backup Book should be required reading for all Executives and IT Managers. The technical information is given in an entertaining way for a business audience. The business aspects of company data are explained to the techie crowd along with the necessary technical information

And the writing style makes it a page turner.

Buy it for yourself or the person at your company that changes the backup tapes every night. You will sleep better.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great all-around book, May 17, 2005

By	Larry Penne (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews

This is one of the few backup books that isn't slanted toward a single product (such as a VERITAS book, or an EMC book). Covering what the authors found to be "the most prominent problems in the network today," this book focuses on basic solutions for the problems that we all face in the real world.

And it is written in a style that is part straight to the point and part humorous. The only thing that I would suggest adding is a set of powerpoint slides for training (maybe next time guys?).

Is this book an in-depth book on every subject? No. This is not the be-all-to-end-all SAN backup book. Or RAID book. Or the "best of breed" for anything that it covers. But I don't think that the authors meant it to be a drill-down-to-the-bottom type of book. It covers what it needs to cover to suggest the right solution. And for most of us, that's just fine.

But if I had to grab one book when I head out to think through backup problems, this is the book to grab.