Backing up Oracle Archive filesystems

[Terry Johnson_1]

We currently backup the archive filesystem onto a DDS tape Drive. When the filesystem hits 75% we kick off the job which will back up the log files and then remove them. However, at times it isn't fast enough when backing up, so the filesystem fills up. Does anyone out there have similar problems or ideas to eleviate this problem?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Buzz,

You have a fundamental problem. A DDS drive can't possibly keep up with a very active database; it's throughput is simply too low.
You could obviously reduce your threshold to
say 40% but that is not certain to work either. Switching to a DLT7000 or DLT8000 would help. Your real answer is to increase the size of the filesystem which houses the archive directory. My answer to this is to have a large mirrored (or RAID'ed) archive filesystem that is backed up nitely. I then have a cronjob that remove files that are older than 1 day - if and only iff the backup status was good. My final step is to have an ITO alarm that warns me whenever any filesystem reaches a preset limit.

Regards, Clay

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
If you use offline redo logs, try the attached script.
It will zip most of the files. Then you should be able to tar the zipped files.
Rgds
Alexander M. Ermes

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,
how about adding disk space ??? I don't like to be dependable on just one tape. I always try to keep the archived redologs for 2 - 3 days (compressed however).
regards,
Thierry.

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Hi
Sorry to be askin questions in your thread Buzz, but have the same setup as Clay suggests, and;
Clay:
How do you check the backup status in your cronjob removing files older than 1 day:

I'm running Legato backup of the archive filesystem, and haven't been able to figure out a way of doing this.

Andreas

[JACQUET]

Andreas,

I have been used to settle backup software for Oracle DB (OmniBack, Networker and NetBackup), and the best way to be sure of the validity of a backup is to do a clone of the tape : if the clone is Ok, that means that the tape is readable and the contents Ok. Most of software tools have a special command to copy tapes (i.e bpduplicate for netbackup for example).
The Pb, you need much more DLT Tape.

PJA.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Andreas:

When my nitely backups via OmniBack complete and before I do the removal of old archives,
an omnimcopy command is fired off to copy the night's backup media for off-site storage. I monitor the success of the copy operation and then remove the archive logs.

In my case, 1 day is sufficient because I shutdown the database, do a snapshot mount, and restart the database in about 1 minute. I then backup the snapshots. For about a minute of downtime, I have cold backups and thus 1 day's worth of archives is all I need.

Regards, Clay

[Volker Borowski]

Hi Buzz,

is this a SAP environment ?

If yes, there is an option for brarchive to save the archives continously. In addition, you could configure to write to two tapes at the same time.
The call would be

brarchive -f -ssd

-f = fillup
-ssd = double save and delete

check brarchive documentation on this.

I have a customer running a productive SAP system with 400MB of archiving area and a
permanently running save to tape (I am not happy with this, but it works).

Hope this helps
Volker