Re: incremental backups

You've received a couple of answers about the incremental functionality in exports, but I don't think that's what you need. The reason for this is because the way incremental exports are implemented. What Oracle does is simply keep track of which tables have changed in any way since the last export by setting a flag for the table. Then the next export that is done that is not a complete export will export the whole table. Here's the important point. If you have a 50 million row table and 1 row is changed, the export takes ALL 50 million rows.

The tool you really want to use is rman. Recovery Manager allows backups of just changed blocks, and also doesn't back up empty blocks, so it can make a huge speed difference in your backups. The only issue here is you haven't mentioned the version you're on. rman came with Oracle8, so it's not available with 7.3.

HTH. Pete

nwsread_at_cloudband.com wrote:

> Hi, i am wondering what facilities oracle has
> for incremental backups. This is backups only of what
> has changed since the previous backup so that it would
> happen very quickly. Instead of backing up the whole
> database which would take a long time.
> My reason for this question is that if we have bugs
> in our code where say we are updating the wrong rows, we could
> recover from much of our destruction by restoring from backups,
> and if incremental backups were possible they could be done more
> often then full backups.
>
> What would be optimal however is some type of table
> version control similiar to what cvs does with src files, where
> we could restore the table to any state depending on timestamp
> or user tag.

--
Regards

Pete

Received on Mon Aug 16 1999 - 11:45:41 CDT