The time to plan for a recovery is before you need to recover data. There are several ways in which your data can be backed up, and each way has its limitations. No two installations will have the same requirements, nor will they necessarily back up data in the same way. In Table 4.1, we list the most common scenarios and show the appropriate backup strategies.
If You Need to... |
Use This Mechanism |
Recover up to the point of failure |
Hot backups Cold backups with archivelog mode |
Recover individual tables |
Exports Tablespace point-in-time recovery |
Recover on a different operating system |
Exports |
Create a point-in-time view of the data for historical records |
Exports Cold backups |
Recover the database to a point prior to a failure |
Hot backups Cold backups with or without archivelog mode Exports |
Not have downtime for backups |
Hot backups Exports |