Re: Archiving to tape

From: Tribble Dave <DLT3716_at_KCPL.COM>
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 09:28:00 PST
Message-Id: <9601091536.AA14889@alice.jcc.com>

I would personally NOT write an archive directly to tape. Someone from Oracle support once told me that in general, tapes are less reliable than disks. I'll take their word for it on this one. Also, since a tape is a sequential device, you will have to rewind it to do a verify step on your data. If you data (your archived redo logs) is bad, what are you going to do??? You have no archived redo logs, you better do a full backup.
I have a script that looks for every instance on a given machine that's in archive mode, it then does a copy of /*/ORACLE_ARCH/<databasename>/* to tape whenever <x> number of archived logs are present (checks every 10 minutes). The tape is verified then duplicated. Only AFTER the tape is verified and duplicated are the logs removed from disk. It's worked well so far.

dlt3716_at_kcpl.com

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From: owner-oracle-l
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Archiving to tape
Date: Tue, Jan 9, 1996 9:00AM

Dave Scerba wrote :

• I have read in the Oracle DBA I course notes that you can write the archive
• logs directly
• to tape. Is this operating system specific ??? I was under the impression
• that they had
• to be written to a disk file first then copied off later by the tape
• software.

It is possible and it is operating system specific. If you have Oracle support then give them a ring - they sent me a really useful fax on the subject. The actual archiving to tape is controlled via an SQL*Net process (!) unfortunately although this works in SQL*net V1 there is (or was) a bug which prevents it working in SQL*Net V2 (This applies to HP UNIX, I don't know about other operating systems. Have you considered writing the records to disk and then having some sort of daemon or process which kicks in at regular intervals and copies the archives to tape ?

Simon Received on Tue Jan 09 1996 - 10:36:36 CST