Oracle Security

Chapter 12. Backing Up and Recovering the Database

A recent news story reported that a company suffered grave financial losses because a disgruntled employee destroyed the entire company’s information system. The company spent many weeks and millions of dollars to recover their system. The company had viewed their backup strategies as “adequate” but had not tested their recovery plans thoroughly. When disaster occurred and they tried to recover their data, they found they could not recover all the files they needed. Their standard procedure had been to keep their backup data for one month and then reuse the tapes for new backups. In attempting to recover their data, though, they found that they had to go back further than one month. The data they needed was no longer available.

Even with rigorous security, a company can be vulnerable to data loss. One of the best policies a company can follow is to take a proactive stance in determining what forms of backup will be used to help ensure that the system can be successfully recovered. No matter what form of backups you choose to implement, we recommend you thoroughly test your recovery procedures to ensure that:

• You know how to perform all forms of recovery with confidence.

• You have completely analyzed your backup and recovery strategies.

• You can successfully read your tapes on different tape drives from those used to make them.

The third point is very important. If you have created your backup tapes on one type of tape drive, you might ...