Re: erasing Archive log

From: Big Al <db-guru_at_att.net>
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 20:35:29 GMT
Message-ID: <39C1362B.E49BB8A1@att.net>

"Howard J. Rogers" wrote:

><<snipped>>

>
> No problems. Just restore from last night's backup. Except a touch of
> nerves has set in so plonker DBA retrieves all-important tape from tape
> cabinet, drops it, and sees it scatter in a thousand pieces across the
> Server Room floor. Oops.

This has happened elsewhere. In fact the company I used to work for in a 100,000 sq. ft. datacenter with over 250,000 tapes installed special padding in the tape library and by the tape drives to reduce the occurrences of broken tapes.
> <<snipped>>
>
> Moral: if you are too keen on deleting old archives, you will find yourself
> in deep doo-doo before very long. Make allowances for human clumsiness and
> human slackness, and all will be well.
>
> I personally recommend keeping at least a week's-worth of archive on disk
> before archiving onto tape (and I have a tape rotation cycle that keeps
> stuff for at least 5 weeks). But then I do have shares in Seagate.
><<snipped>>

At one company where I installed their first Oracle system (on NT), I set up scripts to zip the previous days backups (both datafiles and archive logs) so that they would have enough room to store a weeks worth on disk without resorting to tape. That left the current backup and archive logs on disk, 6 days of zipped backups on disk, and nightly network backups of all disk contents including the backups. I believe in redundancy for backups.

Big Al Received on Thu Sep 14 2000 - 15:35:29 CDT