Re: What Backup strategy would be the best ?

Some general remarks:
It all comes down on two questions:
- how much dataloss can you afford
- how much downtime can you afford
Then we have two different types of errors - physical errors (power outage, disk crash) - logical errors (someone accidentally delete 32 rows from a 3 million row table)
Backup and export are two completely different things.

In theory export protects against logical error only. However, the database can be so small and with minimal activity, that it is suited to survive a head crash. Generally speaking, if you have a head crash and you only have an export, you will have to rebuild the complete database and you will loose data.

Backup is completely unsuited to protect against logical errors. The example above is a real world case (I admit, I did it myself!), there was no export, we were forced to do this by means of recovery and that took us 8 hours. So, IMO you need to both.
Answering the question on downtime, you will also know whether you need to use cold backup (with archivelog please) or hot backup (7x24 operation, archivelog mandatory)

RMAN probably should do the job, but Oracle has replaced backup products quite a few times.
Personally I like Arcserve in combination with a special Oracle agent from the same firm. This product can handle both hot and cold backup automatically, you don't need to write any script.

Hth,

--
Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA
Dominic Cribbin <dominic.cribbin_at_cognotecSTOPSPAM.com> wrote in message news:7vc7c9$i2i$1_at_ezekiel.eunet.ie...
> I have a Oracle 8i (8.1.5) database on a Unix Sun Box I am try to decide
> which backup strategy suits my needs best.
>
> The database which eventually stored in another country so I will have to
> administrate it via telnet. I was initially thinking about using
> EXPORT/IMPORT as the backup mechanism but I am worried that if the machine
> fails and I cannot get the database open (before running the import) then
I
> will not be able to run the import script therefore not recovering my
> database correctly (I may be wrong on my thinking here !).
>
> The other option I was thinking of using would be RMAN (Recovery Manager),
> this tool I have only started to look at, I would not be that familiar
with
> it but judging from the help provided by it it seems to have everything I
> need. Therefor which one of the these approaches would suit best.
>
> I was also hoping to implement a strategy where I take a full backup twice
a
> month and incrementals for every day of the week and a Cummulative backup
at
> the weekend. Would RMAN be able to work on a schedule as the one above ...
>
> If there are other approaches I have not mentioned I would like to hear
> about them. Many thanks in advance.
>
> Dominic
>
>
Received on Fri Oct 29 1999 - 12:40:28 CDT