Re: Hot Backups

In article <1993Nov23.233517.23889_at_scammell.ecos.tne.oz.au> mag_at_scammell.ecos.tne.oz.au (Mark Gurry) writes:
>To: David Crowson from Amoco

           deleted stuff

>
>I think without nighly exports, a site is leaving itself wide open for a
>disaster. Two possible disaster scenarios are (1) where an individual table is
>corrupted, that only an export can pick up (2) where an individual table
>is dropped, has key rows deleted from it or has a faulty program incorrectly
>update rows, requiring recovery to PIT.
>Any DBA who has HOT BACKUPs and NO NIGHTLY EXPORT is asking for a DISASTER.
>
>In fact, I believe nightly exports are mandatory part of any backup/recovery
>strategy.
>

On my last project, exporting only ONE of our tables took 14 hours. We also had about 6 hours of nightly batch work to run every night. I think that for every application, nightly exports are not necessarily the answer. The only feasible backup plan for our 12+ gigabyte database was to make bi-weekly cold backups and archive. We of course occasionally exported user tables, but for our production data export was not an option.  

Backup and recovery is tricky business, and you should understand all the alternatives.

Pat Payne
Data Systems Research & Development
Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee
gzz_at_ornl.gov Received on Mon Nov 29 1993 - 21:58:26 CET