Re: Backing up 1 TB database

"IANAL_VISTA" <IANAL_Vista_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:Xns96A8B8EDC7B43SunnySD_at_68.6.19.6...
> "john.mcconnell_at_jhmi.edu" <john.mcconnell_at_jhmi.edu> wrote in
> news:1123165903.190915.236030_at_f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
>
>> Hello,
>> We're implementing SAP on IBM AIX V5.3 with Oracle 9i and we have
>> several databases that are almost 1 TB in size. Currently we do the
>> backup by:
>> 1) put db in backup mode
>> 2) flash (IBM shark) from the source disk to a target disk
>> 3) take db out of backup mode
>> 4) mount target disk
>> 5) use "save" command to back up to Legato
>> 6) unmount target disk
>> So, every day I'm doing a full backup of my database. This is getting
>> (and will get worse) very time consuming. (We've not implemented
>> production yet and it's already 1TB!)
>>
>> How do other people handle backups of databases that are this large?
>> I've heard there are products that do incremental backups--would that
>> work with the "flash" scenario I've mentioned? Is Legato the way to
>> go? Is there something better?
>>
>> Sorry if these are stupid questions... I'm an AIX admin...
>>
>> Thank you
>>
>
> My advice is to be SURE that you actually test recovery.
> I know from 1st hand experience that Net. App. snapshots
> were not viable means of backups if they were taken on an
> active OLTP system. The snapshots taken during periods of
> low activity still were NOT 100% reliable; only about 8 out
> of 10 sucessfully restored.
>
> Keep in mind that 1 data point does not make a trend.
>
> HTH & YMMV
Mmm ... not my experience with SAN snapshots ... we successfully recreate our pre-production OLTP database (some 200 GB) each month with SAN snapshots. Never had any problems. During the split, the db is put in hot backup + suspend mode. Oracle 8.1.7 on AIX 5L with EMC Symmetrix DMX801. However, for backups, we take a hot backup every 3 days and keep the archived redo log files on disk between the backups.

Matthias Received on Fri Aug 05 2005 - 01:13:58 CDT