Re: Managing archive logs

I would like to keep them around longer, but some days we must backup and delete several times. Our archive log directory is 8 GB and some days we generate 30 GB of logs. I did neglect that we make two copies and store one off-site.

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> You delete every day's archived logs after backing them up? What happens
> if one of your daily log backups is not readable when it comes time to
> restore?
>
> My current system includes backing up the archived logs every day, but
> not deleting them until two cold backups have occurred after they were
> backed up. I don't ever want to be in a position of not having a
> complete, restorable database, and I'm sure you don't either...
>
> John P. Higgins wrote:
> >
> > First a question:
> > How many generations of backups do you keep?
> > We keep all backups for a minimum of 28 days to protect against unreadable backups.
> > Since every recovery to the current point in time will require every archived log
> > from the time of the backup till now, we must also keep the archived logs for at
> > least 28 days.
> >
> > We don't keep our archived logs on disk. We backup these to tape daily and delete.
> > Then we keep the tapes for 28 days.
> >
> > In a recovery, we restore data file(s) from the backup tape(s) and also restore
> > every archived log since the backup. Then the database can be recovered. In other
> > words, Oracle reads the log file(s) and re-applies every transaction that occurred
> > since the backup.
> >
> > npm_at_netcom.com wrote:
> >
> > > I'm at a site where we have oracle archive logs to deal with and
> > > I'd like to be able to remove these big suckers after we've done a
> > > cold backup. However, our backups are fully automated and I'm a little
> > > nervous about deleting these automagically. My concern is that the
> > > backup might fail and the archive logs would be deleted...
> > >
> > > How do other sites handle this? Have you developed an automated
> > > means of doing this? Is there any software or tools that you
> > > recommend?
> > >
> > > My one thought right now is to create a file to use as a timestamp
> > > when Oracle is started up after a level 0 backup and then, after
> > > the backup has been examined by a human eyeball, is to delete any
> > > archive logs older than the timestamp file. Does that sound reasonable?
> > >
> > > I'm not an Oracle DBA though I play one on TV. I'm actually just
> > > a Unix system administrator. Your help is hugely appreciated!
> > >
> > > --
> > > Nancy Milligan Milligan Consulting Services
> > > npm_at_netcom.com System Administration, Perl/C/shell programming
> > > Internet Connectivity, Security, Usenet, WWW, and so on.
> > > http://nmcs.com
Received on Sun May 17 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT