1. Administering Oracle SOA Cloud Service
  2. Administer Oracle SOA Cloud Service
  3. Perform Lifecycle Operations on an Oracle SOA Cloud Service Instance
  4. Back Up and Restore an Oracle SOA Cloud Service Instance
  5. About Backup and Restoration of Oracle SOA Cloud Service Instances
  6. Contents of a Backup

Contents of a Backup

What a backup contains depends on whether the backup is an incremental backup or a full backup.

For details about the volumes that are backed up, see About the Disk Volumes in Using Oracle Java Cloud Service.

Topics:

Contents of an Incremental Backup

An incremental backup contains only runtime artifacts of each managed virtual machine in the service instance.

Note:

All incremental backups are automated scheduled backups. You cannot create an incremental backup on demand.

While creating an incremental backup, Oracle SOA Cloud Service promotes the backup to a full backup if any of the following conditions are met:

  • The configuration data of the service instance has been restored since the last scheduled full backup.

  • The service instance has been scaled out since the last scheduled full backup.

  • Oracle SOA Cloud Service can now reach a virtual machine that it could not reach during the last scheduled full backup.

  • The last full scheduled backup is no longer available.

You can recognize a promoted backup in the list of available backups from its type and creation time. Any full, automated backup created at the scheduled time for an incremental backup has been promoted.

Contents of a Full Backup

A full backup contains all the runtime artifacts required to restore the service instance’s configuration data.

Specifically, a full backup contains these items:

  • The Oracle WebLogic Server domain configuration of the service instance, which consists of these items:

    • The $DOMAIN_HOME volume of each virtual machine

      Managed Server persistent stores that are not stored in the Oracle Database Classic Cloud Service database deployment are stored under $DOMAIN_HOME. Examples of Managed Server persistent stores are transaction logs and Java Message Service (JMS) providers.

    • Oracle WebLogic Server domain configuration files in the $MW_HOME volume of the Administration Server virtual machine

  • Oracle Traffic Director configuration for the load balancer

Note:

Oracle SOA Cloud Service does not back up any software, including Oracle Fusion Middleware software installed on the $MW_HOME volume. You are responsible for ensuring that you can re-install any software that you have installed on a service instance’s VMs if necessary.

Links Between an Incremental Backup and Its Related Full Backup

Each incremental backup is linked to the last full backup that was performed before the incremental backup. As a result, each full backup is linked to all incremental backups that were performed between that full backup and the next full backup.

You can restore a service instance from an incremental backup without the need to restore the full backup to which the incremental backup is linked. In this situation, you are responsible for ensuring that the service instance is in a consistent state after the service instance is restored. See Restore an Oracle SOA Cloud Service Instance from a Backup.

However, you cannot delete or archive a full backup to which one or more incremental backups are linked. If you want to delete or archive a full backup to which incremental backups are linked, you must delete or archive the linked backups first. See Delete a Backup.

Items that Are Not Backed Up

Oracle SOA Cloud Service ensures that backups contain only the volumes that are needed for a proper restoration of a service instance.

Therefore, the following items are not backed up:

  • Users' custom volumes

  • The $JDK_HOME volume, which contains the JDK software

  • Software binary files in the $MW_HOME volume