Adapting an Existing Backup Strategy for Recovery Appliance

When you decide to move from an existing backup strategy to one that uses Recovery Appliance for data protection, you need to make some modifications to your existing strategy. All RMAN backup and recovery scripts that you currently use will work in a Recovery Appliance environment with minor modifications.

The following modifications are required to adapt your existing RMAN backup and recovery scripts to work with Recovery Appliance:

  • Modify RMAN channel configuration or channel allocations so that they use SBT channels corresponding to the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance backup module (Recovery Appliance backup module) instead of disk or tape channels.

  • Modify RMAN backup scripts and remove commands whose behavior is modified in Recovery Appliance.

  • Simplify existing RMAN scripts by removing commands that are not required in a Recovery Appliance environment.

See Also:

Modifying RMAN Channel Configurations

An RMAN channel represents one stream of data to or from a backup device. The channel reads data from the input device, processes it, and then writes it to the output device. RMAN supports the following types of channel configurations:

  • DISK (backups are stored on disk)

  • SBT

    Backups are stored on one of the following: tape using media management software such as Oracle Secure Backup, Recovery Appliance using the Recovery Appliance backup module, or on the Oracle Cloud.

Existing RMAN scripts will use either a DISK channel to backup to disk or an SBT channel to backup to tape. To back up to or restore from Recovery Appliance, you must configure use an SBT channel that corresponds to the Recovery Appliance backup module installed on the protected database host. In a Recovery Appliance environment, your backup and recovery scripts must allocate an SBT channel with the SBT_LIBRARY parameter pointing to the Recovery Appliance backup module.

See Also:

"Using RMAN Channels for Recovery Appliance Backup and Recovery Operations" for examples of allocating or configuring RMAN channels for use with Recovery Appliance

Modifying RMAN Backup and Recovery Scripts

If your backup scripts use any RMAN commands whose functionality is slightly modified in Recovery Appliance (listed in Unsupported RMAN Commands), then you must modify the scripts to replace these commands with the appropriate new commands. For example, the RMAN UNREGISTER DATABASE command functionality works differently with Recovery Appliance. Therefore, you must modify your existing RMAN scripts to replace the UNREGISTER DATABASE command. Note that the DBMS_RA.DELETE_DB procedure that must be used instead of UNREGISTER DATABASE can be used only from SQL*Plus, not RMAN.

If your existing backup strategy uses the RMAN incrementally updated backup strategy that merges successive level 1 incremental backups with the initial image copy backup, then modify the RMAN commands to use the Recovery Appliance incremental-forever backup strategy.

See Also:

Removing Unnecessary RMAN Commands

Typically RMAN backup and recovery scripts contain commands to validate backups. This includes commands such as VALIDATE and CROSSCHECK. Because Recovery Appliance automatically validates all backups from protected databases before writing them to the storage, these commands are no longer required after migrating your existing data protection strategy to use Recovery Appliance. While adapting your existing strategy to use Recovery Appliance, remove the VALIDATE and CROSSCHECK commands from your scripts.

From your existing backup strategy, you also need to remove those operations that will now be performed by Recovery Appliance, such as backing up to tape and deleting obsolete backups.