Unix Backup and Recovery

Ease of Recovery

I often quote an old coworker of mine, “No one cares if you can back up—only if you can restore.”^[38] Ease of recovery and speed of recovery often are overlooked when evaluating backup products. Many small factors can make doing restores either very easy or impossible.

Platform independence

This is a very important factor. Some products have gone to the trouble to ensure that every volume made by every version of their software can be read by every other version, no matter what platform it was made on. If this has been done, and a client is destroyed, its data still can be recovered, even if the replacement version is not of the same type. If volumes are not platform independent, an administrator might need to keep a functional machine of each operating system version just for restores.^[39] Having true platform independence also makes doing regular restores much easier.

Parallel restore

This can be a very nice feature. When restoring a large directory or filesystem, the backups for that filesystem may be spread out over several volumes. Some products are able to read all these volumes at once, making the restore actually faster than the backup. When investigating this possibility, you also should find out if these volumes can be loaded in any order.

User restores

Some environments have sophisticated users that who like to be able to do their own restores. If this is true in your environment, then this feature will come in handy. Those who do not want users doing their ...