RE: RMAN physical backup verification

From: MacGregor, Ian A. <ian_at_slac.stanford.edu>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:53:31 -0800
Message-ID: <26E3EC48949D134C94A1574B2C89466113A7BE@exchange2.slac.stanford.edu>

If I understnd correctly, the validate command only verifies that the database can be restored to a consistent state bsed on the latest level 0 backup, assuming incremental backups are used. It does not confirm the ability to recover to a point-in-time more recent than that.

There was the idea of using until time, but does this really do anything with the validate command:

RMAN> run
{
allocate channel c1 type 'sbt_tape' format 'df_%t_%s_%p' PARMS='ENV=(TDPO_OPTFILE=/opt/tivoli/tsm/client/oracle/bin/tdpo.opt)'; restore database validate until time 'sysdate +1'; release channel c1;

This runs. Restoring the database to a future date could be very profitable for ESPN or stock market DBA's. The until time is an upper limit, and there was the off chance that the lack of errors meant the validate was going throgh the backed up redo logs plus the online ones and found no breaks, though this was highly doubtful. I then switched through the redo logs, so the online ones did not contain the data needed to recover, and the online logs were not backed up. I moved the not yet backed up archived logs to another directory

I ran the restore validate statement with

until time 'sysdate'

Again no errors.

Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
ian_at_slac.stanford.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Gorman [mailto:tim_at_sagelogix.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 5:38 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: RMAN physical backup verification - incrementals

Rich,

It could be that, from a validation standpoint, incremental backups at level
> 0 simply do not matter -- only FULL and LEVEL=0 backups matter for
recoverability. I have a report against the RMAN repositories to do the same validation, but I also completely ignore incremental backups where level > 0, because they exist only to expedite recovery (and worrying about them only complicates the report). I don't know if Oracle uses this same reasoning for a validation operation, but they might...

While RESTORE VALIDATE is excellent, another equally valid recovery test is a DUPLICATE TARGET DATABASE operation. If you're short on space and running 9i, you can exclude all but a few small tablespaces so as not to consume too much disk space with the duplicated database. That operation should certainly utilize incremental backups.

Just my $0.02...

-Tim

on 3/23/04 11:08 AM, Rich Holland at holland_at_guidancetech.com wrote:

> We run a weekly incr level 0 and daily incr 1 backups via RMAN. I'd
> like to verify that whatever we write to tape is good; normally I'd do
> this by requesting a restore to test it.
>
> Rman has a nice 'validate' feature that I tried to take advantage of
> via something like this:
>
> connect target;
> run {
> allocate channel c1 type sbt;
> restore database validate;
> }
>
> This works, but I noticed that it always requests a restore of the
> last INCR 0 backup -- even if several days since then have passed.
> How do others verify that their INCR backups > 0 are cleanly written to tape?
>
> Thanks!
> Rich
> --
> Rich Holland (913) 645-1950 SAP Technical Consultant
> print unpack("u","92G5S\=\"!A;F]T:&5R(\'!E<FP\@:&%C:V5R\"\@\`\`");
>
>
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Received on Wed Mar 24 2004 - 18:50:14 CST

RE: RMAN physical backup verification - incrementals