Log files are absolutely required if you are performing online backups.
 A. the database has to be in logretain mode to allow an online backup
 B. all transactions that occur during an online backup only go to log and
won't be captured in the backup AFAIK.
Otherwise logfile archiving is only necessary if you are interested in
recovering the data that was committed after the last backup, if it is
acceptable to lose all the data that is entered between backups then there
is no need to archive log files.

The practice I use is to perform offline backups every night (my outage
window allows this) and log archives whenever a log is released, the log
archives have a 30 day retention. Or you could hack together a script to
backup the released logs and then delete them after the next successful
offline DB2 backup so that TSM marks them as deleted.

-----Original Message-----
From: Lars Bebensee [mailto:LBebensee AT HAITEC DOT DE]
Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 2:18 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: (Silly?) DB2 Backup question


Hi guys and girls,

this question is one of the general sort, so forgive me if it has been
answered here or in some manual I haven't red yet. Probably, I just need a
simpler description.
AFAIK, there are three ways to backup a database:
1. Offline filesystem backup
2. Offline backup in the databases quiesced mode via some api
3. Online backup via api

The first question I have is about the transaction log archiving. With
which of the above does it make sense and why? The second one: does it make
sense to run offline AND online backups in a backup cylce, or will one of
them be save enough? I read through the TSM  Redbook on DB2 UDB
implementation. It just explains the ways RDBMS backups can be done not
which combinations are useful. As far as I could extract, it is rather
useless doing offline backups and log file archiving but no online backups,
right??

Thanks in advance

Lars


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