Re: Poor Backup Strategy???

Glenn Burton (gburton_at_cbis.com) wrote:
>The system administrators of one of the systems I work with do not shut down
>the Oracle instance to take a cold backup. Instead they simply copy the
>datafiles during the night. The reasoning behind this is that "the system
>is quiet at that time of day, so there is really no reason shut down the
>instance".
>Assuming that there really is no user activity in the database, is this a
>sound backup strategy or should the instance be shut-down before copying
>the files?

Backups taken in this fashion are not generally reliable for recovering the database. For a usable cold backup, Oracle should be shut down gracefully ('shutdown normal'). An alternative is to take hot backups on a tablespace-by- tablespace basis using ALTER TABLESPACE...BEGIN BACKUP and END BACKUP.

I encourage you to read Part IV (Chapters 17-19) of the Oracle7 Server Administrator's Guide for more information.

/b

--
Bill Manry  -  Mainframe and Integration Technologies  -  Oracle Corporation
Standard disclaimer applies.