Re: RMAN Recovery catalogue

Replies in-line:
On 10/10/22 05:44, Paul Houghton (Paul.Houghton) wrote:
>
> We have RMAN backups with a recovery catalogue, which backs up to
> Netbackup, which of course maintains its own catalogue of backups.
>
> I have two issues keeping the catalogues in sync
>
> Issue 1 – Test/cloned databases
>
> We have test databases which are backed up, but periodically refreshed
> from production. The issue is that the database which relates to the
> backups I have taken no longer exists, but there is another database
> with the same name. I can’t delete old backups because I have an
> archive log deletion policy. It seems I have to choose between
> managing the archive logs before the database is refreshed, or
> managing the backups after it has been refreshed, unless we can change
> the archive log deletion policy just before the database is deleted. I
> did open an SR which resulted in Doc ID 2545757.1 being updated to
> reflect this.
>
What does archive deletion policy have to do with deleting old backups? DELETE BACKUP OF DATABASE COMPLETED BEFORE.... will wipe out the unnecessary archive logs as well.

> Issue 2 – Offline backups
>
> Some backups are written to tape and stored offline. These have a
> different retention period to the normal recovery window, so I tell
> RMAN they are archival backups and specify the retention time. It
> seems Netbackup deletes reference to these from its catalogue as they
> are stored offline. So if I do a crosscheck it marks all offline
> backups as having expired. I can’t seem to get RMAN to manage these
> backups. When it comes to delete them it says they have expired and to
> run a crosscheck, but if I do that it marks all offline backups as
> having expired. Then if I delete expired backups, it will delete all
> offline backups. Is there a way to tell RMAN that these backups are
> offline?
>
> Has anyone solved these issues? I’d like to completely automate my
> management of backups, but either I am misunderstanding something, or
> RMAN doesn’t handle anything but  the simplest cases.
>
> Thanks
>
> Paul
>
When you move backup tape from a unit not visible to NB you need to do crosscheck backup of database device type SBT_TAPE. You can also do "CHANGE" to AVAILABLE. This is all pretty routine stuff. Be careful, if you delete the backup from catalog, you will not be able to change it back from EXPIRED to AVAILABLE.

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Mladen Gogala
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