Introduction

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Welcome to the wonderful world of backup and recovery. Since you are here, we are assuming that you have been either given the task of putting together a backup and recovery system for your organization or you are in a position where you are thinking about how backup and recovery fits within the scope of total data availability for your organization. This is a topic that has been mostly ignored or given very low priority, and until recently, you couldn't even get the young junior administrators to pay attention to backup. People are starting to realize that just about all enterprises are dependent on their data, and protecting it is equivalent to protecting the company or agency. This hasn't made backup and recovery any more exciting, but at least it has gained some well-needed recognition from upper management. The best way to view it is just like insurance. You wouldn't try to run a company without insurance even though you hope never to have to use it. The basic backup can be viewed in the same way, but as we will see as we venture further into the world of backup and recovery, it can be a bit more.

Overview of the Book and Technology

The goal in writing this book is to provide you, the reader, with enough information to be able to architect a backup and recovery system that will work for your specific needs. While there are some of you out there that would have loved a book that explored the 'soft underbelly' of NetBackup, perhaps that will come; however, we felt that the very first book highlighting this market-leading product should be more of a 'best practices' approach. Which is exactly what we have done. This book will not be able to answer all your questions, nor can it provide a spreadsheet or cookie cutter formula that you can just feed data in and expect answers to come out. Believe it or not, a well-designed backup and recovery system is complicated and dependent on your specific configuration and business needs. We will cover the different areas that must be considered and arm you with the information that you will need in order to get the data necessary to allow you to architect your system. As you start to gather the information, you will have to rely on people from many different areas within your company or agency. You will need information concerning disk layouts, network topology, data structure, and a whole lot of other things we will get to in the later chapters.

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