Recovering the Recovery Appliance

12 Recovering the Recovery Appliance

The Recovery Appliance has a background process that backs up the necessary EM agent, OSB catalog, and Recovery Appliance catalog information (e.g. backup metadata, protected database/VPC users, protection policies, etc.) This process runs every 2 to 8 hours (depending on release and number of racks in your Recovery Appliance) alternating between compute nodes. This process is scheduled to run from the crontab every 12 hours for 2 node cluster or every 6 hours for a 4 node cluster.

In the event of a complete system failure, this backup is used to recover the Recovery Appliance catalog, along with all users and policies at the time the backup was taken.

Goals of the Recovery Appliance Backup/Recovery process:

Protected databases should be able to resume their backups as soon as the system is back online, with no changes to database-side configuration.
Protected databases should have access to Recovery Appliance backups (including tape and replicated copies) as soon as the system is back online .

The most recent export bundle is recommended to be copied from the Recovery Appliance to an external disk or tape location periodically (once or twice a day). This ensures that the export bundles are preserved outside of the Recovery Appliance, for future data recovery purposes.

The export file has the naming convention ra_backup.$date.$$.tar.gz, where $date = $year . $month . $day . '.' . $hour . $min, and $$ is the process id of the running process. The location for the export file is /raacfs/raadmin/ra_export/.

Example: /raacfs/raadmin/ra_export/ra_backup.2022630.051.47141.tar.gz

To recover a Recovery Appliance:

For a one-time export of the Recovery Appliance state, start the export process.
```
[root@<HOST>~]# /opt/oracle.RecoveryAppliance/bin/ra_export.sh --manual
Created ZDLRA export /raacfs/raadmin/ra_export/ra_backup.2019313.1341.333165.tar.gz
```
This covers OSB, EM, and the Recovery Appliance components (non delta pool backup metadata, protected database users, protection policies, etc.)

The automatic exports happen multiple times per day. The export bundles can be copied off-site from this location:

/raacfs/raadmin/ra_export/
After a system outage requiring recovery of the Recovery Appliance, copy the last exported bundle into /opt/oracle.RecoveryAppliance/import/ onto the fixed or new Recovery Appliance.
Run the installation on the fixed or new Recovery Appliance.
```
[root@<HOST>~]# racli install appliance
```