Re: Suitable backup method for me ?

It depends entirely on how important one dayıs worth of data is to you and your users. Running in NOARCHIVELOG mode and simply doing an export once per day leaves you with a potential 24 hour (or however many hours people are actually using the database each day) loss of data if any part of the database becomes corrupt/lost and wonıt open. (Though I must say if youıre going this route and can have the database down at night, you might as well make a full cold backup every night instead of even messing with an export.)

There is nothing inherently wrong with running in NOARCFHIVELOG mode, but it is not as robust as Oracle is capable of providing in ARCHIVELOG mode if you have the disk space to hold the archived redo logs. At no additional cost (other than your time of understanding the more robust backup/recovery features of the database software), you can provide much better recovery of data (as well as probably a much faster recovery) in case of a failure.

The Service Level Agreements Iım held to say that the export method is sufficient and thatıs what was done for the past seven plus years (long before I took over DBA responsibilities three years ago), but I took the time several months ago to convert to ARCHIVELOG mode because I know my user community really doesnıt want to lose data in an outage regardless what they agreed was acceptable (and still agree is acceptable) loss. I still do a nightly export as well as the online backups just in case that needs to be my last resort, but I should be able to surpass their expectations when the need to recover one of the databases arises without needing to fall back to those exports.

In the end, only you and your user community can decide whatıs appropriate and adequate for your system, but thatıs my perspective on the issue from my own environment and somewhat limited experience.

On 5/14/02 10:27 PM, in article absh35$r60$1_at_tenorhorn.hk.dyxnet.com, "Dino Ming" <dinoming_at_hotmail.com> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> Can somebody help me to carify which backup method is best for me. ?
>
> I've 1 RS/6000 loaded AIX4.3.3, and which is running an Oracle 8.1.7.2 +
> 9iAS. We've 2 newly created tablespaces for our data. And it is running under
> NON-ARCHIVELOG mode..
>
> The box is not too critical, as it can shutdown at night.
>
> Currently, I'm using the exp approach to dump these Tablespaces to a file.
> And back it up into Tape every night.
>
> One of my friend told me that using the exp approach to backup the oracle is
> not suitable for me. So, I'm now confusing... and start to find/gather
> information on using RMAN.
>
> Please share your experience with me.
>
> Rgds,
> Dino
>

-- 
Jeff Traigle
traigle_at_si.umich.edu
http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~traigle/