ORACLE 6 Backups

Hi,

    We are currently having a debate on the best way to do backups of Oracle 6 at my company. We currently advise our customers to backup the archive logs daily, the database(DBS file) with the database up weekly, and a full export and a backup with the database down quarterly. We advise them to keep the cycle of daily and weekly tapes for 4-6 weeks. Also we do the backup with the database down and the full export when we install the system.

        As far as I know, we have never lost a database using this scheme. We have a new person in our office who is extremely headstrong, who has told me this procedure is WRONG, plus told me that any of the people who have worked on these systems in the past for our company(going back about 5 years) didn't know anything about Oracle. Her additional suggestion is to do a full export weekly. Her arguement is that if we have such a failure where we have to rebuild the database, we can go back to the weekly export.

        My main question is, what type of failure would it take to render my scheme inadequate. We keep 3 copies of the control files, each on a different disk. If all 3 control files got wiped out somehow, or if the database crashed while updating the control files and wiped out the most current one, could I still recover. I believe there is still a difficult way to recover from this, but its not one of those things normally written in a book(Oracle might have to assist).

        Should we go this additional step of exporting weekly? I also questioned my co-worker about incremental exports, which would seem to be the sensible companion procedure to weekly exports. She was unfamiliar with them. I read about them in the Oracle DBA book, but it didn't tell how to do it, so if anyone can tell me, that would be helpful too. I would appreciate any input or suggestions. Thanks very much
Guy Gilstrap
BGILST_at_GMUVAX.GMU.EDU Received on Thu Sep 22 1994 - 13:19:41 CEST