Re: Regular backups -- What is standard practice?

Carol Dayton x2940 <cdayton> wrote:

>Our organization presently does not use the archive log capability, but keeps
>multiple backups -- Namely, 1 copy of the last day's work on each of 2 disks,
>and 1 copy of the previous backup. We have never, in the 5 years of VAX VMS
>operation had a disk failure. System backups are performed by the VAX
>adminitrator on a daily basis, and kept, for all intents, forever. We are
>considering, for disk space saving, not keeping as many backups as presently --
>namely , as single copy of the total export. Please note these are cold
>backups of the full system. Are we incurring significant risk by doing so?
>What is ( other than archive logging) standard practice in this area?
 

>Thanks

Please, start using archive mode. Currently, unless there is so little activity that the online redo logs never get fillled up between the cold database backups, you will lose any, or most data between that backups. That's fine for flat files and such, but one of the reasons for the DBM's cost is the ability to recover everything up until the moment of the crash. I guess if you mirrorred everything, and had multiple controllers, you could get away with other configurations, but then the cost is high again. We've used archiving since we started using Oracle in '87, and only had a couple of serious hardware crashes - the worst during a bulk load of several hundred records. After the crash and recovery, the program's log showed ~200 records had been inserted, and Oracle had everyone of them. It really comes down to the importance of your data.

Bob King
Business Phone - (817) 551-8223
** all comments are personal and do not necessarily

   the views of my employer, wife, daughter or dog (a pug) :-) Received on Tue Nov 07 1995 - 00:00:00 CET