13 Archival Backups

The Archival Backup is a full backup with KEEP specified for a specific point in time and intended to be held in tape or cloud storage until a future point in time.

An archival backup is used to maintain a fixed recovery point on cloud or tape. It has advantages over the present operational strategy to satisfy any point-in-time recovery within the recovery_window_sbt period, because the archival backup doesn't have to regularly copy incremental backups and archived log backups.

For example, an organization has a security requirement to generate a monthly full backup and to keep five years of these monthly backups available in cloud storage. To achieve this, the organization schedules archival backup command to be executed at the end of each month with KEEP UNTIL SYSDATE+5 YEARS.

The Recovery Appliance supports archival backups sent to tape or cloud. Archival backups to disk are not supported, because they diminish the storage capacity and performance of the Recovery Appliance.

Note:

The databases must have archived log mode turned on. The CREATE_ARCHIVAL_BACKUP command requires archive logs to properly compute the necessary files to create a complete consistent backup for archival purposes. Databases with archive log mode off must continue to make KEEP backups of the protected database and then use the MOVE_BACKUP command to archive onto tertiary storage.