Ugo Bellavance wrote: > Hi, > > I've been testing different methods and I'd like to have some advice. > I want to perform a cold backup once a week on the Oracle DB, and put it > on tape. I'm using EMC Networker for backup software, and I am not too > at ease with the fact of doing eveything with Networker, because if > there is a problem with the backup, the Oracle DB might not come up > after the backup run. What version and edition of Oracle? Use RMAN, that's what it's there for. You can backup online, or offline, full or incremental. At my last company we ran Oracle 10gR2 standard edition connected to a small fiber channel SAN. I wrote a script that put the tables on the primary server in hotbackup mode, then snapshotted the Oracle volumes, and mounted the snapshots onto a virtual machine that was running software iSCSI. From there a job kicked off and ran RMAN to backup the database. Prior to that we ran enterprise edition and was able to run RMAN directly from the physical standby server. With standard edition you can't do that. The migration from Oracle EE to Oracle SE probably paid for the SAN in itself let alone the massive increases in productivity gained by the flexibility of a centralized storage system(copying production data went from ~2 days to about 1 hour, copying data to reporting database went from ~8 hours to ~10 minutes). You can also run RMAN against the primary system as well(any edition I believe), though I didn't want to do that as it'd impact performance. nate