Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9. Backup and Recovery
As an administrator, you will have already recognized the importance of establish-
ing well defined backup and recovery procedures. It is easy to write in length on
this topic alone, discussing various backup, restore, failover, migration, and dis-
aster recovery strategies. Fortunately, we will focus on the most important areas
in this chapter to simplify the process for you as best we can. As long as you un-
derstand a few core concepts regarding the overall backup and recovery strategy
for Oracle SOA Suite 11g, you can implement it in any number of ways.
Establishing a backup and restore strategy is important because it provides you
with the ability to restore your environment in the event of a critical infrastructure
or hardware failure. For instance, if you experience a hard drive failure, the disks
may have to be replaced and the software restored from backup. It also provides
you with the ability to restore your environment to a previously working snapshot
in the event of a faulty patch, faulty code deployment, or faulty configuration. In
some cases, these faulty updates are not undoable and thus a restore may be
needed.
In this chapter, we will cover the following key areas:
•
Understanding what needs to be backed up
•
Recommended backup strategy
•
Implementing the backup process
•
Recovery strategies
•
Cloning Oracle SOA Suite 11g
There are really two types of backups you can perform—offline backups and on-
line backups.
Offline backups
are taken when the entire environment is down.
This is the preferred approach, as all tiers are backed up at the same point, en-
suring that a full restore will be an exact point in time snapshot. Unfortunately, it is
usually difficult to find the downtime needed for a full offline backup, and
online
backups
may have to be utilized in certain cases. You may now be wondering
what kind of data is important and needs to be backed up.
