Chapter 14: Backups

In this chapter, you will

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  Gain a better understanding of backups



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  Determining appropriate backup strategies



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  Select a suitable backup medium



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  Use ufsdump and ufsrestore



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  Use tar, dd, and cpio

Software and hardware failures are an unfortunate fact of life in the IT industry. These incidents often cause a sense of panic in organizations when missing or corrupt data is revealed during a peak service period. However, a system crash or a disk failure should not be a cause for alarm: it should be the signal to a well-armed and well-prepared administrator to determine the cause of the problem, rectify any hardware faults, and restore any lost data by using a recovery procedure. This general procedure can be followed regardless of whether user files or database tables have been lost or corrupted. Fortunately, Solaris provides a wide variety of backup and restore software that can be used in conjunction with any number of media-for example, magnetic and digital audio tapes, writable CD-ROMs, Zip drives, and redundant hard drives. In this chapter, we will examine the development and implementation of backup and recovery procedures with Solaris.