Best Practices to Optimize Cloud Backup Rates

Because cloud backups are sent over the public internet, backup performance is affected by network bandwidth limitations. Use RMAN parallelism and compression to speed up cloud backups and restores.

To optimize performance:

• Use multiple RMAN channels for higher parallelism, which results in full utilization of the network. You can configure as many RMAN channels as you want. For example, the following configuration uses eight channels in parallel to back up to the cloud:

RMAN> CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE sbt PARALLELISM 8;

Try increasing the parallelism until you find the optimal transfer rate.

• Use an RMAN compression level of MEDIUM.

• Use multisection backups. With these, multiple RMAN channels are used in parallel to back up large data files in separate sections.

  You create multisection backups by specifying the SECTION SIZE parameter with the BACKUP command. For example, the following command specifies a backup section size of 1 GB:

RMAN> BACKUP DEVICE TYPE sbt DATABASE SECTION SIZE 1g;

• Use a backup strategy of weekly full and daily incremental backups. This results in faster backups and could save a significant amount of network bandwidth. Use the RMAN fast incremental backup feature (based on block change tracking) to optimize the performance of your daily incremental backups.

• Also note it is recommended practice to include the RMAN format string %d and %U to ensure uniqueness.

• Use a recovery catalog to store long-term backups. For information about recovery catalogs, see Managing a Recovery Catalog in Oracle Database Backup and Recovery User’s Guide.

Note: You can test network throughput by using the throughput measurement tool. See Testing Network Throughput in Managing and Monitoring Oracle Cloud.