This chapter describes some of the backup and recovery strategies you should employ when planning an upgrade.
Before you start the upgrade process, you should have a clear understanding of the backup requirements. These requirements vary somewhat, depending on what is being upgraded.
The following sections provide more information:
The ultimate success of your upgrade depends heavily on the design and execution of an appropriate backup strategy.
To develop a backup strategy, consider the following questions:
How long can the production database remain inoperable before business consequences become intolerable?
What backup strategy is necessary to meet your availability requirements?
Are backups archived in a safe, offsite location?
How quickly can backups be restored (including backups in offsite storage)?
Have recovery procedures been tested successfully?
Your backup strategy should answer all of these questions and include procedures for successfully backing up and recovering your Fusion Middleware environment, as well as your database.
When you upgrade a Fusion Middleware installation, you install the Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 12c (12.1.2) components into a new Oracle home directory.
Consider creating a backup of the new Release 12c (12.1.2) Oracle home before you begin an upgrade. This backup will allow you to restore to a pre-upgrade (that is, newly installed) state. Restoring from backups is an efficient alternative to reinstalling the entire instance, in the event that upgrade results are unsatisfactory.
A useful Release 12c (12.1.2) backup would include both the Oracle home and any additional artifacts created during or after the Release 12c (12.1.2) installation.
For more information on backing up and restoring your Oracle Fusion Middleware environment, see the following sections of the Administering Oracle Fusion Middleware:
Introducing Backup and Recovery
This chapter provides an introduction to backing up and recovering Oracle Fusion Middleware, including backup and recovery recommendations for Oracle Fusion Middleware components.
This chapter describes recommended backup strategies for Oracle Fusion Middleware and the procedures for backing up Oracle Fusion Middleware.
This chapter describes recommended recovery strategies and procedures for recovering Oracle Fusion Middleware from different types of failures and outages, such as media failures or loss of host.
After stopping the servers and processes, back up your 11g Middleware Oracle home directory (including the Oracle product home directories inside the Oracle home), your local Domain home directory, your local Oracle instances, and also the Domain home and Oracle instances on any remote systems that use the Middleware Oracle home.
If your upgrade is unexpectedly interrupted, or if you choose to cancel out of the upgrade before it is complete, you may not be able to continue the upgrade process unless you restore your environment to the previous configuration.
For more information on backing up your environment, see "Backing Up Your Environment" in the Administering Oracle Fusion Middleware.
In most cases, when you upgrade your schemas, you must first upgrade the database that hosts the repository to a database version supported by Oracle Fusion Middleware. This section describes some of the recommended backup procedures you should consider before you upgrade.
Note:
Always consult your database-specific documentation for comprehensive backup and recovery information. For example, if you are using an Oracle database to host your schema repositories, consult the Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Advanced User's Guide.
The following sections provide some best practices when creating a backup plan for your database:
Backing Up the Database Before Upgrading the Database Version
Backing Up the Database Before Upgrading the Database Schemas
As with any database upgrade, standard procedure dictates that you back up your database before you upgrade to a new database version.
Note that you should also consider backing up the database again, after you have successfully upgraded to a new database version. This way, your backup will reflect the newly upgraded state of the database.
For more information, see the Oracle Database documentation for your platform and database version.
IYou should also back up your database before you begin the upgrade procedure. Make sure this back up includes the schema version registry table, as each Fusion Middleware schema has a row in this table. The name of the schema version registry table is SYSTEM.SCHEMA_VERSION_REGISTRY$. Refer to your database documentation for instructions on how to do this.
If you run the Upgrade Assistant to update an existing schema and it does not succeed, you must restore the original schema before you can try again. Make sure you back up your existing database schemas before you run the Upgrade Assistant.
Note:
Performing these backups prior to performing a schema upgrade is a prerequisite for running Upgrade Assistant. In the Upgrade Assistant prerequisites GUI screen, you will be required to acknowledge that backups have been performed, before proceeding with the actual upgrade.
After you have completed and verified the upgrade of your Oracle Fusion Middleware environment, consider backing up your Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 12c (12.1.2) installations so you can easily restore your environment to the newly upgraded state, if needed.
In particular, consider backing up the database that hosts your upgraded Oracle Fusion Middleware schemas immediately after the upgrade process. After this initial post-upgrade backup, you can begin your regularly scheduled database backup routine. The initial backup after the upgrade will ensure that you can restore your environment to the newly upgraded 12.1.2 state without repeating the upgrade process.
In addition, after you have moved your development or deployment activities to the newly upgraded Oracle Fusion Middleware installations, be sure to modify your regular backup routine to include the new Oracle Fusion Middleware directories, including the Oracle Fusion Middleware Oracle home directories and Oracle product directories.