"Hot" Oracle Backups using clonesets

[Adam Garsha]

Does anyone use AdvFS filesystem clonesets to grab online backups of their Oracle databases on Tru64? Any hang-ups on Tru64?

Would this work?:


For each tablespace in my database {
put the tablespace in backup-mode
}

Create a cloneset of the entire "data" filesystem and mount it

For each tablespace in my database {
take the tablespace out of backup-mode
}

Copy all files from cloneset mount point to the "backup" mount point
Unmount and remove the cloneset


Do you have an example script that I could look at for particulars?:

Oracle says this: "Oracle will stop updating file headers, but will continue to write data to the database files even if a tablespace is in backup mode."

Still ok to use filesystem clonesets, correct? Since the Oracle recovery mechanism should handle the possibility of partially written blocks?

Thanks for any input.

[Mark Poeschl_2]

Yes, that mechanism should work fine. I've used it with Oracle installations in the past. It looks like your whole database is in one AdvFS domain, which is a little odd, but doesn't affect the validity of using cloned filesets to back things up.

One thing to remember is that your system restore procedures need to account for the fact that you are restoring to someplace other than what was backed up.

[Adam Garsha]

They are small databases.

[Alexey Borchev · Accepted solution]

I vould add in Oracle
"Alter system suspend"
before making clone, and resume after Advfs has created clone.
Just to suspend Oracle IO at clone creation moment.