On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 10:14:13AM -0600, Jake Wilson wrote:
> Thanks for the replies, everyone.  I have not tried the backup yet, so I
> don't know what to expect.  I just didn't want to try it on a whim without
> researching it a bit more.  The servers are not just file servers.  They run
> Oracle and proprietary data modeling software that do a lot of data
> crunching throughout the day.  Just needed to make sure that rsyncing stuff
> during the process was not going to hinder performance too bad.

You said you were expecting a lot of data and are running oracle, I
just want to make sure you understand that you CAN NOT just backup
oracle files while oracle is running and expect to be able to restore
them.

You have to tell oracle you are doing the backup copy the data files
and then tell oracle you are done and then [qcopy the journal
files. It's been a few years since I have worked with oracle, so I am
sure my explanation is too simplistic (and may be incomplete/wrong),
but you can't just rsync oracle files and get a restorable oracle
setup.

Also if your "proprietary data modeling software" dumps state files so
that the application can crash and the data modeling can restart from
the saved state, you may have to interact with that software as well
to make sure that it has a consistant dump state on disk that is
useful as a restore. Nothing like finding out an anayslsis that ran
for 60 days before the disks crashed hard only had valid checkpoints
in the backup for day 2 8-(.

-- 
                                -- rouilj

John Rouillard       System Administrator
Renesys Corporation  603-244-9084 (cell)  603-643-9300 x 111

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