November 1999
Intermediate to advanced
736 pages
22h 46m
English
Content preview from Unix Backup and RecoveryBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Testing Your Backups
I wish there were enough to say about this to make it a separate chapter, because it’s that important. I can’t tell you how many stories I have heard about people who wait until they need a major restore before they test their backups. That’s when they find out that they’ve been using the wrong device or the wrong blocking factor or that the device had I/O errors. This point cannot be stated strongly enough. If you don’t test your backups, then you are guaranteed to get a surprise sooner or later.
Test Everything!
It is important to test every type of restore. If you are testing filesystem backups, make sure you:
Restore many single files. Can you find the needle in the haystack?
Restore an older version of a file.
Restore an entire filesystem, and compare your results with the original. Are they the same size, and so on?
Pretend that an entire system is down, and try to re-create it.
Pretend that a particular volume is bad, and force yourself to use an alternate backup.
Retrieve a few volumes from your off-site storage vendor.
Pretend that your backup server is destroyed, and try to recover from that. (This one’s tough!) This test is extremely important if you are using a commercial backup utility. Some products do not plan for this well, and you can find yourself in a real catch-22 situation.
If you are testing database restores, make sure you:
Restore part of your database, pretending that you lost only one data file or disk drive, if this option is available.
Restore ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.