Chapter 9: Backup and Disaster Recovery Approaches

I have said it already earlier in this book and it bears repeating no matter how many times it takes: nothing is as important in what we do as system administrators as maintaining good backups. This is our utmost priority. It is so important that many organizations maintain an independent system administration team that handles nothing but backups to make sure that it maintains constant attention.

Backups are not glamorous, and they are rarely exciting. This does not just make them a challenge for us in the technical world to want to spend time thinking about them when we could be implementing new automation or something else admittedly more exciting, but it also means that management often does not prioritize budgets or prioritize around backups. This creates a potential danger for system administrators that our careers can be slowed if we focus on critical functions like backups instead of doing flashy, high-profile projects to...