1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Managing Recovery Appliance
  3. Copying Backups to Tape with Recovery Appliance
  4. About Copying Backups to Tape with Recovery Appliance
  5. Overview of Copying Backups to Tape with Recovery Appliance
  6. About Tape Operations on Recovery Appliance

About Tape Operations on Recovery Appliance

All backups that Recovery Appliance receives from protected databases are always first stored on disk. The Recovery Appliance can then optionally copy these backups to tape. All copying to tape is automated, policy-driven, and scheduled.

A protection policy defines desired recovery windows for backups stored on tape. Recovery windows are expressed as time intervals, such as 30 days. Backups are retained on tape long enough for a recovery to be possible at any time within this interval, counting backward from the current time.

You can copy Recovery Appliance backups from disk to tape. To perform this task, you must create a tape backup job that defines the properties of the copy operation, such as the media manager library and attribute set that will manage this job, the protection policy or the database for which the backups need to be copied, and so on. After you have defined the job properties, you must schedule this job to run.

Note:

  • Only backups that have not already been copied to tape are processed in a tape backup operation for each tape backup job template with which the backup is associated. Thus, a tape backup operation on the same backup after the initial tape copy has no effect. In addition, only the most recent backup is copied to tape when the tape backup operation runs.

    If you require more than one copy of the same backup, such as to a different media family on tape, use the COPIES parameter of the template or create a separate tape backup job template for the additional copy.

  • Virtual full backups copied to tape or cloud use RMAN FILESPERSET=1 setting. Incremental backups copied to tape use the FILESPERSET setting as specified in the RMAN incremental backup command to the Recovery Appliance.

  • Backup pieces, such as archive logs, are grouped together and copied as a single piece. These backup pieces are larger on cloud or tape storage. This feature is disabled by default and can group a maximum of 64 archived logs per backup piece that is copied to cloud or tape. The effects of inter-job latencies are reduced when fewer individual pieces are transmitted.

  • Long-term archival backups that were created with the KEEP option of the BACKUP command are never automatically copied to tape. You must manually copy them using the COPY_BACKUP or MOVE_BACKUP procedure.

    See My Oracle Support Note Doc ID 2107079.1 (http://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2107079.1) to learn how to create archival backups for long term retention on the Recovery Appliance

During a restore, Recovery Appliance transparently retrieves the backup from tape.

Recovery Appliance writes backups to tape in formats supported by RMAN. If a protected database has the required media management software (for example, Oracle Secure Backup), then it can directly restore backups written to tape by the Recovery Appliance.