The Backup Book: Disaster Recovery from Desktop to Data Center

View larger picture

List price: $49.95 Amazon price: $0.79 You save: $49.16 (98%) Prices subject to change. Used price: $0.79 Buy Now at Amazon

Author: Dorian Cougias
Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780972903905
Label: Schaser-Vartan Books
Dimension: 1.45 x 9.02 x 7.54 inches
ISBN: 0972903909
Manufacturer: Schaser-Vartan Books
Publisher: Schaser-Vartan Books
Number of items: 1
Number of pages: 725
Publication date: July 01, 2003
Studio: Schaser-Vartan Books

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.

---

Ratings & Comments(Average:)

---

- Important information for backup...but recovery techniques no-so good.
A big part of my job is to review these books for our professional clients. And I must admit that this is a good primer in that it clearly demonstrates pitfalls and techniques for backing up your data. We would also add that for important documents using a professionally managed data set like Writely or Gmail, is your best chance of not losing key documents. Simply because if Google looses your data, they have billions of dollars in deep pockets that they must protect. However if your backup plan fails, as they so often do, please consider using a professional data recovery firm, like aaa-datarecovery, if your data is mission critical, or if your data set is complex. RAID users beware that re-generating an array is most often the kiss of death for your data.

Talk to the professionals, its not cheap, but only you know how your business will be affected if your important data is lost forever.

[...]

---

- Great coverage, a bit outdated, little Linux information.
This book covers lot of information about IT disaster prevention and a bit of risk assessment. Backups are only a subtopic of the book. The author tries hard to explain several interesting details about each topic, then explains how to prevent the problem using several applications of his choice. I usually find useless this later kind of information, as the applications I use may not be the same the author used; however I liked the examples in this book, because there are several applications I didn't even know existed.

Also note that this is a book for corporate solutions. However, most information can be used also at the home LAN, the SOHO or the small business.

The author usually uses a very informal and humorous tone; I find it nice, but I know some people will find it annoying.

I also liked the cost-sensitive vision of the author: he always suggest several options according to the available money for the job.

What I did not like is the lack of GNU / Linux coverage; the author always talk about Windows and Mac, sometimes says "Unix", but Linux is mostly absent from this book. Fortunately, people with Linux experience already know what tools to use, and will find this book useful for the "what to do" information, not for the "how to do".

If you buy this book, please take note that it was written several years ago. So, for example, the author says that a NAS solution can be expensive, but today you can buy a mini NAS server with journaled filesystem for less than 200 dollars (a perfect solution for a SOHO pr small company).

So, overall, I think this is a good intro book to disaster prevention and recovery, and it can help you to make a plan for your IT department.

---

- Borrow and read, don't buy
This book attempts a broad coverage of every aspect of preventing data loss and server downtime in the enterprise. Is it successful? Perhaps....

Each chapter basically consists of three parts: relevant information (where the core information is), product reviews and manuals, and acknowledgements - with an overindulgence in "humour". At times, the book reads more like a collection of stories by other authors, with the acknowledged author as editor. There is also an abundance of white space in the book - the margins are very large.

It would appear (given these facts) that the author was trying to "bulk up" the book.

However.... there is excellent information in this book, and the book is worth reading. Ignore the humour when it misses (one paragraph was almost entirely humour!) - read selected product information when it is relevant - and it will be worth your time.

This book also helps you to consider, in detail, what could happen to your data and changes your thinking for the better. What good are backups if they have a virus on them? What happens if the building falls down onto all of your backups? What happens if all the backups contain the same corrupted file?

This is more of a book on Disaster Recovery and Prevention than backups per se; perhaps, in that way, the naming is unfortunate and misleading.

This book is worth a read - it's well worth your time, but not your money. Borrow it - read it - absorb it - and return it.

---

- A for Effort, C for Implementation
This is a difficult book to rate. If you look at it compared to what else is out there on this subject, its 4 stars. However, if you rate it as to whether it achieved the goals it set for itself, I would rate it a 2 star book. The essential problem is the book can not figure out where to place its emphasis. I complete agree with R Earl "unixnut"'s review on this point. No one can expect to cover the breadth of this book's table of contents effectively. This is because no one author can know it all. That being said, professionals interested in backup should buy it in any case, just because there are so few titles in this area. For people who want more of a practical how to guide devoted to PC backup, check out How to Backup Your Windows Computer on DVD. Implementing Backup and Recovery is better for people interested in corporate backup.

---

- Still doesn't fully cover the topic of backup and recovery
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.

---

---

More Products