Re: Backup and restore.

"Haoyu Zhou" <hzhou_at_cs.cmu.edu> wrote in message news:Pine.SOL.3.95L.1021008144938.24494A-100000_at_post.ices.cmu.edu...
> I need some help over data backup and recover.
>
> I have a database Oracle 8i on Solaris 2.7. I used ufsdump to backup the
> whole file system including binary, configuration, etc.
>
> Now if I reinstall the database(same version), how can I restore the data
> from the ufsdump file.
>

You can't. I've no idea what ufsdump is, but you can't have datafile X, Y and Z freshly created via a reinstall and expect to populate them with data from datafiles A, B and C that were contained in a previous backup. Recovery doesn't work that way. You are supposed to restore the datafiles A, B and C from the backup and then recover them using the archived redo logs that (we hope) your database has been producing.

You could conceivably restore the old datafiles to a different location, and fire up the old database, and then use export/import or database links to populate the new datafiles. But it will be a slow old process, and fraught with difficulty.

> Secondly, could I use export/import to backup every piece of information
> from the database and later recover it fully.
>

No. Export is a snapshot of the database, so it's complete (as complete as you want it to be, anyway) but it's immediately out of date. If you export on Monday, and your database dies on Thursday, you can restore the database as it was on Monday. End of story. It's impossible to "fully" recover your data if all you've got is the export. You will lose data, in other words.

Incidentally, a search of this newsgroup's archives at Google will show you a number of posts made over the past few weeks and months with people complaining vehemently about the 'incompleteness' of any export: it contains nothing owned by SYS, for example, and privilege grants made by SYS are not exported too. And materialized views lose something in the translation, aswell.

Regards
HJR
> Thanks in advance.
>
Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 14:10:03 CDT