Help needed performing an offline oracle backup using Arcserve

An apology in advance if this post is long winded and confusing. My company has recently purchased and installed Sample Manager (LIMS) which is an Oracle Database. It's my job to backup the Server which this LIMS software runs on.
Unfortunately, I know nothing about Oracle and need help performing an offline backup. The Server is Windows 2000, Oracle version 8.1 and I have Arcserve 9 backup software.
I don't have the Arcserve Oracle backup agent as the DB is only required between 8am and 6pm and my company doesn't mind losing a days work. All I really need to do is shut down Oracle with a batch file, perform a full offline backup and start up Oracle again every night. I do this already with a few SQL Servers without much bother using Arcserves PRE and POST options.
What I really need to know is how to take Oracle and LIMS offline using commands so that I can create a batch file to do this. With SQL this is easy because all you need to do is net stop MSSQLServer. However, I notice the following Oracle Services that are started – OracleOraHome81Agent, OracleOraHome81DataGatherer, OracleOraHomeHTTPServer, OracleOraHome81TNSListener, OracleServiceLIVE and OracleServiceTEST. There are also the following LIMS services running – smpbackLIVE, smpbackTEST, smpLIVE, smplock, smpTEST, smwLIVE and smwTEST.
The three sm LIVE Services are all dependant on OracleServiceLIVE. Do I need to stop all these Services before performing an offline backup? Or do I only need to stop OracleServiceLIVE and its dependencies? If so what is the command? Could it be as simple as net stop oracle? What about the LIMS Services – they will obviously stop when I stop Oracle but what about starting them again?

In case it is important the DB is only a few GB and not expected to grow too large.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Do you need any other info?

Thanks
Badbark. Received on Tue Jun 24 2003 - 06:15:31 CDT