Backing up Oracle Database server

Hello Davide,

Thank you for your question!

You are perfectly correct: when backing up the machine with the database running we need to suspend its services for the moment of creation of snapshot  (not the entire backup). Suspending takes usually not more than 2-3 seconds.

Usual enabling VSS in the Set options manually (or Default options) -> Database Support helps us, as far as we access the databases through VSS. In case you are using the Windows 2000 which doesn't have VSS you need to use the batch files in the before/after commands.

Unfortunately at the moment we do not support the backup of the Oracle database, and do not have any scripts for it designed and available - you will have to create the batch files manually. You can do it in the following way:

The main idea is to stop the services before the snapshot and start after it. So just go to the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services, find all the services related to Oracle and use the following template to stop and start them: 

net stop <service1>
net stop <service2>

net start <service2>
net start <service1>

Please let me know should something seem confusing, I will be glad to explain.

Thank you!

An oracle database can be up 24*7*365 with transactions occuring every single second of the day and you could still backup the running database without any loss of service and without vss.
check index your oracle manual for phrases such as archive log mode, hot backup.

Your backup isn't really acronis specfic as it is oracle specific.
support.oracle.com or general oracle forum sites would be more forthcomming.
even experts-exchange has solutions for you.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Database/Oracle/Q_20955831.html

Hello Yana and oracledba,

thank you for your replies.

The main problem using the 'net start' and 'net stop' commands is that is not possible to verify whether such commands ended successfully or not and thus the database couldn't restart properly after backup.

The 'stop&start' scripts should be more complex for error handling and look like this:

start /wait net stop OracleOraHome92Agent
sc query OracleOraHome92Agent|find /i "STOPPED"
if %ERRORLEVEL% == 1 GOTO ERROR1
echo OracleOraHome92Agent... STOPPED - %DATE% / %TIME%>>templog.txt
.......
GOTO END
:ERROR1
ECHO %ERRORLEVEL%
EXIT 1
.......
:END
ECHO %ERRORLEVEL%
EXIT 0

Of course the second problem is the database availability as mentionedy by oracledba.

I think that we'll use Acronis on the 2nd server only (Windows 2003) in combination with the VSS technology but we'll need to define a different backup strategy on the Win 2000 server.

The solution proposed by oracledba seems to be really efficient wrt database availability but, of course, in case of an heavy fault of the Oracle server it will take a longer time for restore than an Acronis backup.

Also, I'm not an Oracle expert and thus a full system backup would avoid me to fall into the Oracle circle... (e.g.: currently I've no idea about how to restore an Oracle database from datafiles, init files and control files).