RE: Long-Term Archiving

From: Michael Fontana <mfontana_at_enkitec.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2008 15:33:02 -0600 (CST)
Message-ID: <1316605.7441228858382182.JavaMail.root@mail.enkitec.com>


Uwe, it is with great humor that I inform you, when confronted with this dilemma, the response always is:

"Hopefully I won't be here in ten years".

If you want a more serious consideration of this issue, I will tell you that I've actually been in the position where I had backups from an older OS and database release and was asked to restore them. In one case, we found another shop in the area who had a like configuration, and they were also our backup site, and we had a successful recovery. In another situation, it was Oracle 7 and an older version of Solaris, and the application was already on Oracle 10 (this was about one year ago). In this case, we were able to perfectly duplicate the platform, only to find that the tape backup system had been upgraded and the format of the original tape had not been modified, resulting in a failed recovery.

In summary, the professional way to handle all infrastructure upgrades is to assure that escape hatches are built and tested were it necessary to go back, or restore a backup. There is a whole science, art and profession to it all, and there are a lot of companies in the USA who offer it as a service. It's not cheap, and it's not easy.

I wouldn't rely on any one technology to assure a good backup. In one of my examples above, the Oracle backup format would have been irrelevant.

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Received on Tue Dec 09 2008 - 15:33:02 CST

Original text of this message