Dave's Free Press: Reviews
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/reviews
being why I think things suck and/or rocken-usZ Book review: Backup and Recovery
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/reviews/id/review-backup-recovery
Author: Curtis Preston<p>ISBN: 0-596-10246-1<p>Publisher: O'Reilly<p>I contributed part of a chapter to this book, and so I got a free copy. I was expecting to take it home, put it on the shelf, and never use it. Today, less than 48 hours after getting the book in the post, I had to use it. The thoughtful comments and excellent description of how dump / restore work prevented me from looking like a complete tit on a public mailing list. I therefore recommend this book.<p>More seriously, it does look jolly good, covering just about all the backupish stuff that I've heard of and lots that I haven't. But more importantly, it devotes lots of space to restoring your backups - complete with step-by-step instructions for "bare metal" recovery - and talks about things to do when your backups are broken.<p>And it covers things that lots of admins don't like to think about, like Exchange and MySQL (and other databases; judging from a quick skim of the Oracle section I expect the coverage to be good).<p>Buy a copy of this book for your friendly local sysadmin. He will love you for ever.<p> 2007-06-07T20:12:24Z