Re: backup differences between SE and OL - question.

> In <1993Jan14.155534.9281@elsouth.uucp> john@elsouth.uucp (John White) writes: > > carry out "reversal activity" on. You would need twice as much disk > space if you unload to disk and then do UNIX backups to tape, or you > would have to do a hell of a lot of tape swapping, if you unload direct > to tape. You can tbunload an entire database, but in order to tbload it > back in again you would have to "DROP DATABASE", which would make me > extremely nervous ( and in a "normal" OnLine environment the disruption > would be unacceptable). We've been educating our customers on just this aspect of OnLine recently. They had concerns that some particular tables would be "misused" by their employees and wanted to be able to recover them on demand, without restoring the entire database. The 'tbunload' is the only real solution. But, you can get away with not swapping a billion tapes for every backup (assuming your tables aren't enormous that is). The trick here is to tbunload to the "no rewind" device of the tape, and just stick several back to back. I imagine that this will bring problems if your tables have a chance of spanning the tape. Discovering what happens then is an exercise for the reader. Our tables aren't 2 Gig in size, so I'm not worried. Most systems have utilities to skip sections of tape, but if all else fails you can always "cat /dev/no_rew_tape > /dev/null" until you've skipped as far as you've needed. "Try before you buy." "Take a test drive today." "Your mileage may vary." Will (uunet!la4gen!villy) - (me@zipbang.socal.com) It would be nice to be able to recover a specific DATABASE from an OnLine Level 0 archive, though.