Hilton Tina wrote:
>
> we have heard that sysback can backup & restore raw logical volumes.
> Does anyone have any experience with sysback and Oracle?

I have a good experience with Sysback. I never used Oracle, but I have
to do backups of other database systems like Pick and Informix.

Sysback can do backup and restore of raw logical volumes.  However,
while the backup is being performed, it is strongly recommended that you
stop the database system, so that no process can write in those raw
logical volumes.  Sysback can only perform a full backup of the logical
volume, because it does not know how the database is organized.

In summary, the work done by Sysback is very close to a "dd
if=/dev/lvname of=/dev/rmt0.1".  The only difference is that Sysback's
tape files contain a header before the raw data, so you can easily see
what logical volume has been backed up, when the backup was done, and
you can add a freely-choosen "description" field.

The solution we use for doing backups of Informix and Pick databases is
as follows.  Once a day, we do an incremental backup using the backup
procedures provided by the database system.  In addition, we perform
once a week a full system backup of "rootvg" (using Sysback), we stop
the database system, we perform a backup of the raw logical volumes
(using Syback) and we restart the database system thenafter.

So, the weekly operation will provide another (full) backup of the
databases, which could be useful if one of our incremental backup done
by the database system appears to be unreadable.

Hope this helps.


Alain