Possible if 4 tape device for backup, 1 for restore oracle db using rman/Omniback?

[Steven Wong_1]

Hi,

I'm using RMAN 8.1.6 with Omniback II 3.5 There are 4 tape devices on production system and I allocate 4 channel for backup. Is it possible to restore to a test system with 1 tape only, allocating 1 channel for restore? Or should I allocate 1 channel for backup only, sacrifice backup performance?

Your help is highly appreciated.

Steven Wong

[Stefan Farrelly]

It depends how your RMAN backup is setup.

1. You can use RMAN to do a snapshot to disk. Then at your leisure backup these files to whatever tape drives you have/want using whatever backup command you desire - eg. we simply use fbackup to 1 tape. So to restore we can use our single backup tape in any test server and restore the journal files. This is the fastest method, if you have sufficient disk space, as dumping to disk is very quick.

2. RMAN can dump direct to tape or multiple tape devices. In this case you dont want the database frozen for writes for too long, so having multiple tape devices to backup to is desired. Thus on a backup/test server you can could configure 1 or more tape devices to restore from. No problem with that.