Re: Online vs offline backups

Many of us haven't had the luxury of downtime for cold backups for production systems in many years. Hot backups are quite sufficient. However, whenever I do a cold backup of a dev or test database (and when I could do cold backups in production) I *always* back(ed)up the redo log groups and the control file. Why?

1. You don't HAVE to restore the redo logs - and definitely shouldn't if you have surviving current redo logs and want to recover as much as possible.
2. Its a "no-brainer" to restore and recover a test system to a known state with a cold backup of datafiles, redo log groups, and a control file. Just slap them down, copy redo members & control if necessary, and startup. Very handy for repeating variations of tests from the same consistent known state.

Don Granaman
[OraSaurus - Oracle 6 backup habits die hard!]

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Monday, June 24, 2002 12:38 AM

> Hi, guys,
> We have discussed this topic many times on this list. Actually a good DBA
> should design a good backup and restore strategy instead of "online or
> offline" according to business situation.
>
> From my opinion, both "online" and "offline" are necessary, for example, I
> do monthly offline line cold backup and daily online hot backup on my
> production db. The only thing you need to know is that if you do offline
> backup, you should backup every thing, include online redo logs,
otherwise,
> you may lost some data; if you do online hot backup, the online redo logs
> are useless when you do restore.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Shine Sha
> Snr. Oracle DBA
> iGINE Pte. Ltd.

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Author: Don Granaman
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