Migrating Existing Backups to Recovery Appliance

Your existing backup strategy may store protected database backups in a local disk location or on a shared disk. After you import the metadata for the protected database backups into the Recovery Appliance catalog, you must migrate existing backups that are within the recovery window goals to the Recovery Appliance storage. You can migrate backups for only a subset of the protected databases contained in the imported RMAN recovery catalog. However, for all the databases represented in the imported catalog, you can begin using the Recovery Appliance catalog as your recovery catalog.

Note:

To begin using an incremental-forever backup strategy with Recovery Appliance, you must first submit a level 0 incremental backup. If a recent level 0 incremental backup already exists for a particular protected database, it might be more convenient to migrate that backup into the Recovery Appliance, rather than take another level 0 backup from the database. After migrating the level 0 backup and any required existing level 1 backups and archived log files, you can then begin the incremental-forever strategy by sending level 1 incremental backups and archived log files.

The recommended strategy is to migrate all existing backups and switch immediately to Recovery Appliance. Any backups created after you migrate existing backups must be stored on the Recovery Appliance.

Use one of the following techniques to migrate existing protected database backups that are stored on disk to the Recovery Appliance:

Configure a backup polling location where all the existing protected database backups can be placed. Next, set up the Recovery Appliance to poll this location and pick up the protected database backups.

See "Setting Up Backup Polling to Migrate Existing Backups to the Recovery Appliance".

If you have existing backups that are stored on tape, then use the steps described in "Making Tape Backups Available to Recovery Appliance".
Back up image copies that are stored on local disk storage as backup sets to the Recovery Appliance using the RMAN BACKUP AS BACKUPSET COPY OF DATABASE command. You must configure an SBT channel that corresponds to the Recovery Appliance backup module, as described in "Configuring RMAN SBT Channels for Recovery Appliance", before you run this command.