Backup and Replication - sync after restore

Hello oracle gurus,

I would greatly appreciate any input on a replication / backup problem I am facing:

The Situation:
I am looking at replicating (multi-server) a European-based oracle 8 db in South Africa, in order to overcome the problems of an unreliable connection between Europe and S. Africa.

Replication is *not* being used as a backup mechanism, because our available bandwidth between here and S. Africa is limited to 128k, and is unreliably available. We therefore do not expect the European users to access the African db, nor Africa, Europe's.
Instead we will be backing up the dbs daily (incremental) and fully during downtime on the weekend.

Question:
Assuming that a catastrophic failure of one of the sites requires a full restore from backup, in what state might the two dbs be after the restore? with incrementals applied? Without?

While the one db is down, may the healthy db be allowed to keep working (naturally available only in its geographical location)?

Will the healthy db automatically sync with the down db once the down db comes back online?

Or will the down (and restored) db be so out of sync with the healthy one, that simply replication will not be able to bring the two back in sync? (what would then be necessary...?)

Note that since available bandwidth is small (128k) compared with the db (about 10-20 Gig), and a full "copy" from healthy location to down location may not feasible.... Couriered cds would likely be faster!

Thanks in advance,
David Katz

please post replies here, or send email with same subject to my usenet spam catcher: mailto:jitterbugboy_at_yahoo.com. Thanks Received on Tue May 15 2001 - 10:45:12 CDT