When I was preparing to write my book and writing down a list of chapters, I had a chapter called "Backup and Restore" pencilled in.

When it came to writing it, I realised that I didn't want the title of this chapter to scare off potential readers of the book and it became "Making Copies of your Data and Using them".

It was a good title because when I started writing the chapter I had realised that I wanted to write about what a normal user (and a user with a bit of additional rights) could do and didn't want to write at all about the sort of stuff done only by the company's backup expert.

So that chapter started with having an Off-line copy (using Colligio but mentioning using Outlook 2007 for that); using Save List as Template  and using the Recycle Bin(s) and only when those sections were done did it mention backup and restore using both stsadm and SPD 2007.

Maybe the same sort of process went on in the brains of the people behind a newly released book which covers the same sort of things as my one - less than 20 page - chapter in their almost 400 page book.

They also didn't want to put people off with a title that included backup or Restore either, but in their case they went for a "finer" title rather than my simplistic one for my chapter and called it (as you'll all have no doubt realised by now) "SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide".

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1584505990/heme0f

They start in fact with the same kind of thing as a chapter called "End User Resources" has Recycle Bins, Save List as Template and (which i didn't) Versions.

Up to about halfway in the book they also cover the same stsadm and SPD 2007 versions of Backup and Restore.

So why buy their book and not mine? (A stupid question as you should of course all buy my book and then look around for books that complement it. <grin>)

Well of course one reason is that they have a lot more room to go into more details about the various options available when backing up / restoring with SPD and stsadm. Another is that they have a chapter on Central Admin backup and restore tools - something that I'll obviously have to read because it never occured to me to use them. But perhaps the main reason as far as the first half of the book is concerned is a chapter on Tips and Tricks for SharePoint's Built-In Backup and restore Tools which are more chatty than the "what do you click" chapters but which helps you to avoid things like having your backups slow down the system to a crawl.

The other reason to buy the book is that it's a full offering that includes the kind of info that your company's Backup specialist needs to know. So there are chapters on both SQL Server 2005 Backup and Restore (plus one on SQL Server 2005 High Availability - I'm not sure how that made it in) and on Windows 2003 Backup and Restore (and again an odd one on Windows 2003 High Availability).

So there you have it. As I wrote in an earlier blog item, this is not a book that will get you a new job but may help you keep one.

I do think it's a worthwhile book to own, but I admit that, considering that it only just came out, I'm surprised on the space spent on Windows 2003 and the almost total lack of any mention at all of Windows 2008 (all I could find was a paragraph saying that it existed and wasn't covered in the book (!) - my own book came out over 3 months earlier and has a chapter on installing in Windows 2008 which only because I had written too *many* pages was moved to the web site for the book rather than being in the printed copy. It was in any case available from day one.).

I'm also a bit surprised by the space given to High Availability which seems to a certain extent to stretch the "Disaster Recovery" title quite a bit - for instance while using RAID-1 discs means that if one disk physically crashes you still have a copy of the data on the second disk (and if you notice you can slot in a new disk to go automatically back to Raid-1 status), and so actually you avoid the need to recover from a disaster as a disaster hasn't occured, it does seem pushing it in a SharePoint Disaster Recovery book to spend almost 3 pages explaining what all the different versions of Raid are for - especially when you see that the first 2 pages are very standard definitions of the different kinds of RAID systems with no reference to SharePoint at all.

In short there are places here where you get a strong impression that they had to stretch to reach the 400 pages they had been told to write. The book would have perhaps been better at 350.

However it has no competition except for individual chapters in some other books. So I'm going to read the chatty chapters to see when to use what method and then refer to the "how to do" chapters when I need to do things.

Oh, and I'd better add that there is a chapter on custom development and scripting to which my only objection is that it too has large chunks of text where - like the RAID section - there is standard information with several lots of consecutive pages where SharePoint isn't mentioned at all. Maybe this is just the fact that the book despite being from a normal publisher (Charles River) is also labelled as being "Course Technology - CENGAGE Learning". Perhaps being pedagogic demands such large amounts of basic knowledge. For me it goes just a little bit too far sometimes - surely its target audience knows what RAID is, for instance?