Please help asap

[Janice_4]

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Guys,Girls

I am new to Unix and I have had to
setup a temporary backup of my oracle
database using fbackup. I want to run
it as a cronjob which will probably use
4 x 2Gb tapes - how will I know when I
tape needs to be changed?

[Vincent Farrugia]

You mean you have to span across tapes?

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi,

When you use cron, the backup script is started in the backgroud, eg. no user intervention requered. Changing the tapes is user intervention so it is not a good idea to start the job in the back ground in the first place. I would advise you to get a DDS 3 drive (12 GB).

Gideon

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hi,

You didn't specify what you have. If you have a DDS autoloader, then you can do this without user intervention, echoing Vrijhoeven's comment. Else, update to DDS3 drive, it offers 12Gb native capacity.

HTH,
Vince

[Tim D Fulford]

Use DDS3 or 4!!!

cron logs all messages to mail or if you do (as I generally do)
0 * * * commds.sh >/dev/null 2>&1
it goes to /dev/null!!!

The only OTHER thing you might be able to do is to take a vxfs snapshot & back that up at your leisure, provided you use VxFS!!.

The only problem is:

1 - You can't use fbackup (it touches all the i-nodes), so you'll nee to use tar instead
2 - I'm not 100% sure how to do a snapshot and am currently experementing!!!

So all in all the above is as useful as "a handbrake in a canoe"!

Tim