Oracle Database Administration: The Essential Refe

Hot or Cold Backups

The following scenarios are designed to allow you to gain experience and comfort recreating the database from backups. They are presented in order of increasing complexity.

1. Recover the database from a full cold backup:

   1. Recover a single datafile.

   2. Recover the entire database.

2. Put the database in archivelog mode and then perform a hot backup:

   1. Create a table in a tablespace with only one datafile. Then insert one or more rows.

   2. Perform enough ALTER SYSTEM SWITCH LOGFILE commands to cycle through all redo logs.

   3. Shut down the instance (optional).

   4. Delete the datafile containing the created table.

   5. Restore the datafile from the hot backup.

   6. Perform media recovery on the datafile. Then verify that the database requested at least one archive file.

   7. Verify that the table was recreated and has all the information required.

3. If you have a backup tool that performs incremental hot backups (e.g., some third-party tools and Oracle8 Recovery Manager), do the following:

   1. Take a hot backup.

   2. Create a table; then insert one or more rows. Place the table in a tablespace with only one datafile.

   3. Perform an incremental backup. Then verify that portions of the datafile were backed up.

   4. Perform enough ALTER SYSTEM SWITCH LOGFILE commands to cycle through all redo logs.

   5. Stop the database (optional).

   6. Delete the datafile containing the created table.

   7. Use your restore utility to restore the table. Then verify not only that the original hot backup was restored, but also that the incremental backup was restored.

   8. Perform ...