Re: ORACLE v6.0 backups

In article <2o0aj0$fum_at_garuda.csulb.edu> efong_at_csulb.edu (Eugene T. Fong) writes:
>I am currently investigating ways to shorten the backup times of
>backing up an 8GiG database. I'm fairly new at DBA activities and
>would like some remedial comments and suggestions. Currently
>my organization takes over eight hours backing up to tape.
>

We have cron job that runs on our Sun server which does a full database export once a week, and incrementals twice a day to a separate disk. A normal unix backup scheme then copies the disk to tape through the network every other day or so. Our database is small enough that we can store a whole week of these (compressed) exports on disk. Another person at our site claims that this may not be secure, but the overhead of archiving the logfiles and doing hot backups does not seem worth it. There was one case where I successfully restored an entire database from an export file, but the export had been done when the database was down for other reasons.

I'd be interested in others comments on the security and scalability of this scheme.

• Woody Kellum