Backup & Recovery

Chapter 3. Basic Backup and Recovery Utilities

Basic backup utilities are the backup utilities upon which all noncommercial backup systems are built. They accomplish the important task of copying data from one place to another, and usually copying into another format (for example, tar). None of these tools have any built-in scheduling abilities, nor can they make a catalog to keep track of the backups that you make with them. If you want to perform these tasks, you’ll need some type of wrapper and scheduling application. This could be a simple batch script and a scheduled task on a Windows system, a shell script and cron entry on a Unix or Mac OS system, or one of the sophisticated open-source utilities covered later in this book.

Basic backup utilities include the native versions of dump, cpio, tar, and dd for Unix systems, ntbackup and System Restore for Windows systems, ditto for Mac OS systems, and the GNU versions of tar, cpio, and rsync that are available for all these platforms. Whether you’re just starting out in the backup world or you’re an experienced systems administrator, you need to be familiar with these utilities.

An Overview

This chapter describes the benefits and pitfalls of several utilities. For all versions of Windows since NT, ntbackup is the only native choice for a traditional backup application, although you should also be familiar with System Restore. Mac OS X users running a version greater than 10.4 have a number of Unix-based backup tools available to ...