Re: Synopsis of a database crash and recovery (or time to bash RAID 5).

Rachael, Paul my sympathies,

Just worked with a site like that - a mine site in West Papua - Last complete cold backup / any backup January 29 (Monthly rotation backup I guess) - Seems when they added a new datafile February 8th they (being the Australian based software developers) told the local guys this file on this other drive needs to be backed up now - so they did - and dropped all the other db files out of the backup list. So nightly since then the mine site support staff have been doing cold backups of 1 data file. The local guys (mine support) told the Oz Developers that they could restore everything on each of the monthly tapes - just didn't tell them what they could restore.

I had thought that we could recover it - they did after all have all the archive logs (mid May - 3 & 1/2 months) - 8.0.4 even seemed to cope with the extra data file - and definately applied the logs to the extra datafile - everything seemed to be going perfectly - but we couldn't force the tablespace online - for some error I couldn't explain (to do with the scns being different on the 3 main and 1 extra data file for the data tablespace I think) we couldn't reset the logs.

Bummer when that failed - thought I had a major win on my hands - Oh well.

The best part was talking the Oz Software development people through a restore over the phone - when their link to the mine site was a POTS dialup to an Oz based office for the mine Management company whose link to the mine was a POTS dialup to an NT Terminal Sever at the mine - The guy at the Development firm in OZ could type in the complete line that I spelled out for him before more than 4 or 5 characters had been echoed - was a real bummer when he made a typing mistake.

Any hows - been there - done that - Paul - just remember it makes a good beer story - nearly as good as my fishing stories.

Darrin.

Rachel Carmichael wrote:

> Paul,
>
> having gone through a somewhat similar experience, my heart goes out to you.
> I do have one question though:
>
> how come NO ONE noticed that the exports weren't being done, that the
> backups were being done with an open database and that the tape drive was
> gone and no backups were being done?
>
> You said that the server crashed in January and that exports and shutdown of
> database before backup had therefore not been done since then. HOW COME NO
> ONE NOTICED???????????????????????????????? We are talking over 5 months
> here.
>
> Rachel
>
> >From: Paul Drake <paled_at_home.com>
> >Reply-To: ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com
> >To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>
> >Subject: Synopsis of a database crash and recovery (or time to bash RAID
> >5).
> >Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 16:54:06 -0800
> >
> >This past week, an Oracle Database (v7.3.4 Workgroup) on WinNT Server
> >4.0 crashed at a remote Client Site. Database running NOARCHIVELOG.
> >Single RAID 5 volume (4 drives), single hardware RAID controller.

.................

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# Darrin Nunn - Senior DBA/AP - Queensland, Australia         #
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