Re: External backup/restore - an idea - comments please

I read a case study about this awhile back but I haven't tried it so I
am only giving knowledgable conjecture not information gathered from
real experience. So take it for what it is worth. I hope this fosters
conversation and debate so I can correct any misunderstandings that I
have because we are also thinking about doing this but we haven't
gotten to the research stage.

Is this what you are talking about:
onmode -c block

<get permanent copy of chunks in some way>

onmode -c unblock

The onmode -c puts all of the chunks into a consistent state and the
block keeps them there until you give it the unblock command. During
the blocked time you can copy every chunk to a file, or tape. If you
have drives that have a double mirroring scheme you can break one of
the mirrors for each drive and unblock the server and then backup the
now unmirrored drive. This method gives you basically instant, as far
as your users know backups. After you copy off the unmirrored drives
you can remirror the drives. I guess you can do this with single
mirrored drives but during the copy phase the database isn't mirrored.
When I say mirrored I mean OS or drive vendor mirroring. I know EMC had
SANS that did double mirroring for this kind of backup. I would suspect
others would have this technology also.

I don't think that you need to do anything with the current and
previous logs. This is because these have been applied to the dbspaces
that you have just backed up.

Now this doesn't solve point in time backups using the logs. You can
continue using onbar to backup the logs. Then to do a restore you copy
everything from your external backup and then you do a onbar -r -e [-t
<time> | -n <log>] [-O] [-f <filename> | <spaces>] to apply the onbar
log backups. onbar will automatically figure out which logs to apply to
get to the point in time that you want. I wonder now if you have backed
up your logs with ontape can you do an onbar physical restore and then
an ontape logical restore? If so then do an onbar -r -p -e ... then
apply the logs that you need using the ontape -l command. It seems like
you can but I don't actually know.

.

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