Unix Backup and Recovery

This Book Was a Team Effort

I have never worked with a group of people like the ones I work with at Collective Technologies. Over the past three years, they have answered question after question about the various ways to back up and recover just about everything under the sun. Thanks to them, there is information in this book that would never have been otherwise. They sent me manpages and verified syntax for commands on versions of Unix that I’ve never even seen. They entered into technical debates about how to compare the architectures of Informix, Oracle, and Sybase. They tested the programs that are included in this book and even wrote a few of them.

By far the greatest contribution that other people gave to this book is that several of the chapters were written by experts in a particular field. I realized about a year ago that I would never finish this book if I didn’t ask some of my friends to help. The result was that more than 20 percent of the final book ended up being written by people other than me. Their expertise in a particular area made their chapters far better than anything I could have written on my own. Having said that, please allow me to formally thank all of my coauthors:

AIX bare-metal recovery

Charles Gagnon and Brian Jensen of Collective Technologies

AMANDA

John R. Jackson and Alexandre Oliva from the AMANDA Core Development Team

Clearcase backup and recovery

Bob Fulwiler of Seattle, Washington

Compaq/Digital Unix bare-metal recovery

Matthew Huff of Collective Technologies

Dump internals

David Young of Collective Technologies

High-availability systems

Josh Newcomb and Gustavo Vegas of Collective Technologies

HP-UX bare-metal recovery

Steve Ferguson of Collective Technologies

IRIX bare-metal recovery

Blayne Puklich of Collective Technologies

Sybase backup and recovery

Bryn Smith of Collective Technologies

Without these folks, either the book would never have been completed or it would contain substantially less data than the book you see today.

Another group of people that I must thank is my technical reviewers. If every book’s author had the team of technical reviewers I had, the world would contain far less misinformation. This book was actually reviewed on an ongoing basis by a number of Collective Technologies people. I set up an RCS system that allowed a team of about 30 reviewers to actually check out my chapters and edit them. They constantly kept me in check, identifying parts of the book that were inaccurate or that needed clarification. You can’t imagine the benefit of having such a great team looking over your shoulder. This special ongoing technical review team consisted of:

Scott Aschenbach	Michael Clark	Norman Hill	Jason Perkins
Rusty Atkins	Nancy Cortez	Todd Holloway	Stephen Potter
Ed Bailey	Jim Donnelan	Bill Huff	Jason Stege
David Bajot	William Duffy	Paul Iadonisi	Vince Taluskie
Mike Bush	Steve Ferguson	Brian Jensen	Gustavo Vegas
Enrico Cantu	Henry Ferrara	Eric Jones	Bryce Wade
Paul Chalker	Charles Gagnon	Cliff Nadler	Asim Zuberi

I would like to give a special thank you to every one of you!

Once the final draft of the book was completed, an entirely different set of people did a complete technical review. These people were brutal! I can tell you that this incredibly humbling experience made this book far more technically accurate than it would have been otherwise. All of the technical reviewers did a wonderful job, but I’d like to thank two of them in particular. Gordon Galligher did an extensive technical review of the entire book, even though he got the review copy late and has a newborn baby! Art Kagel, of comp.databases.informix fame, reviewed and re-reviewed the Informix chapter until it was right. I even got email at 3:00 A.M. once in which he revealed he’d finally found the answer to a question that had been bugging both of us. The readers owe a big thank you to all of the following people:

Those who reviewed the entire book:

Brian Epstein

Gordon C. Galligher

Mike O’Connor

Those who reviewed selected chapters:

Clem Akins

Mark A. Alestra

Scott Aschenbach

Greg Bourgoin

Jeffrey Dykzeul

Norm Eisenberg

Lee Gould

Brian Jensen

Art S. Kagel

Cliff Nadler

Daniel T. Pigg

Rodney Rutherford

Liza Weissler

Wow! That’s more than 40 technical reviewers! That means that if you find something in this book that’s not technically correct, I’ve got 40 other people to point the finger at! Again, I would like to send a virtual high five to every one of these folks. Whether you helped me with the syntax of one or two commands or reviewed the whole book, I couldn’t have done it without you!

I Don’t Know It All

If there’s one thing I learned while writing this book, it’s that I do not know everything there is to know about backups. If you have a better way to do anything listed in this book, have learned any special tricks, or have written any neat utilities that you think would help other people do backups and recoveries, let me know. Email me at [e-mail]. Your tricks or utilities may be included in the next edition of the book and listed immediately on http://www.backupcentral.com.

How Can I Say Thanks?

How can I begin to thank the hundreds of people who helped me?

To God: May any praise for this book go to You alone.

To my wife, Celynn: I say “thank you” for the many nights you spent alone while I pounded away at my keyboard somewhere around the globe. You’re a special woman who never gave up on me or my dream. I love you. Can we finally take a vacation that doesn’t involve a laptop?

To my older daughter, Nina: I say “Yes! It’s finally done!” I know you’ve spent the last three years wondering when you were ever going to get your daddy back. Well, I’m done. Come give me a hug.

To my baby daughter, Marissa: Maybe you, Nina, Mom, and I can finally spend some time together now!

To my parents: What can I say? You always believed in me. You always used to tell me, “I don’t care if you’re a ditchdigger. Just be the best darn ditchdigger in the world.” Well, being a backup guy is as close as you can get to being a ditchdigger in the computer business, and I “wrote the book” on that.

To my wife’s family: Thank you for raising such a wonderful lady. Thank you for treating me as one of your own and supporting us on our quest. Pahingi ng sinagang?

To all the teachers who kept trying to get me to live up to my potential: You finally got through.

To Collective Technologies: I never could have done this if it hadn’t been for you folks. You truly are a special group of people, and I’m proud to be known as one of you.

To Ed Taylor, Gordon Galligher, Curt Vincent, and anyone else who made the call to bring me on board at CT: What can I say? I’d probably still be swapping tapes if it wasn’t for you. (Wait! I am still swapping tapes!)

To Jeff Rochlin: How could I forget the guy who taught me how to use my own RFI? Thanks, dude. I hope Mickey’s treating you really nice.

To all my SA friends: Thank you for supporting me during this project. As I visited your hometowns in my travels, you welcomed me as one of your own. Only you truly understand what it’s like trying to do something like this, and I couldn’t have done it without you.

To O’Reilly & Associates: Thank you for the opportunity to bring this much-needed book to market. (Sorry it took me two and a half years longer than it should have!)

To Gigi Estabrook, my editor: We’ll have to actually meet one of these days! I don’t know how you do this, reading the same book over and over, without letting your eyes just glaze over. You’re a great editor, and I could really tell that you put your all into this project. Thank you, thank you, and thank you. (Now don’t edit that sentence, OK?)

To the reader: Thank you for purchasing this book. I hope you learn as much reading it as I did writing it.

To everyone else: Stop asking me if the book’s done yet, all right? It’s done!