Re: questions backing up...

Whoever told you that is either new to the Oracle world also, or will soon have a problem at his/her own site, sorry to say so.

I recommend purchasing at least the Oracle DBA handbook or the Backup and Recovery Guide from Osborne/Oracle press. I can provide outlines only here.

You are making backups to protect against physical problems: power outage, disk crashes, anything similar. Don't forget to make exports to protect against logical errors:
someone accidentally dropping a table, deleting 32 rows from a 3 million row table and so on.
Basically against, yes, users :)

Oracle distinguishes between cold backup and hot backup. The difference is the state of the database in the first case it's down, in the latter case it's up. The first method is also called consistent backup. You need to do an O/S backup of :
your control files (you can find those in your init<sid>.ora) your online redo log files, (you can find those using select * from v$logfile
your archived redo log files
all your database files (you can find those by select file_name from dba_data_files)

After a successful backup (with verify of course, I you don't want to verify, then don't make a backup), you should be able to throw away the archived redo log files as the database is consistent at that point in time. This scenario is useful, if you don't need to have 7*24 availability, and you can afford to bring down the database during weekends. Keep the archived redo log files online for a week, and if anything happens, take last's weeks backup and recover.

In the hot backup scenario you still need to backup all those files. What's more you need to notify the database an online backup is going on, by issuing the command alter tablespace <tablespace name> begin backup. You need to do this tablespace by tablespace. You probably have the Oracle Enterprise Backup Utility (usually called EBU) facilitating this process.

Hth,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA

MannyMac wrote in message <19990512102308.07938.00001627_at_ng-fi1.aol.com>...

>We are new to the Oracle world.. and we are trying to put together the best
>strategy as far as a daily /weekly and/or monthly backup procedures, on a
>archived enable server
>
>I was told that all the data files in the
>/oracle/product/7.3.3/rdbms/log/ams_p01.ctl
>file should be copied on a weekly basis (all files in quotes)
>and then for a daily procedure backup the archived log files in the
>/oracle7/oraarch/ams_p01/ files (.ARC files)
>
>is this a reasonable strategy???? do I need any other data files besides
the
>ones in the ams_p01.ctl file for the weekly or any other files other than
the
>ARC files for the daily?
>
>how do I know which ARC files to copy?
>
>any help and/or scripts that you can send me will be tremendously
>appreciated...
>
>thanks
>
>Manny
>Yasuda Bank & Trust
>mannymac_at_aol.com
Received on Wed May 12 1999 - 12:30:33 CDT