1. Administrator's Guide
  2. Introduction to Recovery Appliance
  3. Traditional Database Backup Techniques
  4. Weekly Full and Daily Incremental Backups

Weekly Full and Daily Incremental Backups

One popular approach, shown in Figure 1-1, is to use RMAN to take a weekly full backup, and then daily incremental backups. To improve incremental backup performance, Oracle recommends enabling block change tracking. These backups occur when activity on the database is lowest.

Figure 1-1 Full and Incremental Backups to Tape

Description of Figure 1-1 follows
Description of "Figure 1-1 Full and Incremental Backups to Tape"

An advantage of this technique is that backup windows, which affect the production server, are relatively brief on the days when incremental backups occur. A disadvantage is that when the database is continuously active, as when serving multiple global time zones, no easily accommodating backup window is available.

One solution is to set up Oracle Data Guard, and then back up the standby database, thereby removing the backup load from the production server. However, protecting all databases with Oracle Data Guard is often impractical.