Jody Leber
NT Backup and Restore
O'Reilly & Associates, 1998. ISBN 1-56592-272-7. Pp. 320. $29.95

Reviewed by Steve Hanson <[email protected]>

Although this book is aimed at the NT backup administrator, it is primarily a general guide to backup strategy. It gives a good overview of backups -- why they are important, how to plan and scale them, and how to select a tool for backup. Most of this material is as applicable to a UNIX network as it is to an NT network. In fact, there is only one chapter devoted specifically to NT backup issues and the reasons why NT is particularly challenging (proper backup of the registry and WINS database, etc.). I was disappointed that these issues were not covered in more depth, since doing NT backup is one of the issues I'm dealing with at work. The book didn't help me much with my issues, such as backing up open NT files.

The book does have many strengths, however. Several tables help the admin to understand how many tape devices and how much network bandwidth will be needed to do backups within a given time window. If your site is anything like mine, getting backups done during an off-hour window is an ever-increasing challenge as disk space grows. The charts help to determine whether that new file server is going to throw you over the edge. Likewise the book gives attention to reviews of a number of commercial NT backup products as well as those that are freely available with the OS. And a feature-comparison chart for commercial backup products is nearly as useful to the UNIX admin as to the NT administrator.

This is the only book on backup that I know of, NT or UNIX. This is surprising -- we'd all agree that backup is one of the most important things we do, yet there are very few places to learn how to do it well. Many UNIX and NT admins are finding that those commercial backup products are starting to look good as the size of our backup problem increases. This book is a helpful guide to backup in general and how to make sense of the commercial alternatives available to the NT world. Yet I wished that it went into more detail on some of the pitfalls and how to avoid them. Many topics (such as different backup schedules) are covered, but not really in enough detail to be helpful to the professional who has been doing this for some time. I'd recommend this book to the beginning administrator, and particularly to anyone who is considering the purchase of a commercial backup system for NT. It is even fairly useful to the UNIX administrator, as most of the topics covered apply to both environments. However, the old hand at doing backups isn't likely to gain much from the book, with the possible exception of the capacity charts. Even those may not be very useful to anyone with reasonable math facilities, as they are primarily division tables in disguise.