Re: back - up strategy

tks for the insights

yes i can afford a weekly downtime for abt 3 - 4 hrs. that is why the guy has suggested me to do a cold backup every weekend.

your suggestions and some further questions
- upgrade to 9i - my orgn does not have the money for it as my cto
does not think it worthwhile. other than the end of support thing do u think there is anything to it or just oracles plan to get some more money from users ?
- does copying the archive logs / control files using os commands
acheive the same effect as having oracle multiplex them. will multiplexing the redo logs cause a huge performance degrade as oracle will have to write the redo logs on 2 different servers before allowing the process to go ahead.
- what do u think of running oracle parallel failsafe on a windows
cluster. is there some way to acheive ha without having to make a windows cluster as making a windows cluster is quite a difficult process.
- use rman for back-ups. does rman ship free with oracle ? using this
can i take both hot and cold back - ups ? can the archived and multiplexed redo logs be applied to both hot and cold back - ups to do a recovery / restore ?
- backup solutions from veritas et al . - no budgets , can dataguard do
the geographical hedging for me as u have suggested by shipping the logs to a distant location and applying them to a cold back - up taken earlier every hr. to give me a max 1 hr stale copy of the db.
- why do u say export and import is not a back up solution ?

• yeah . the dba loss is something very important and most difficult to plan for. i could not agree with you more on that. tia vidyesh -