Make consistent backup with long retention periods
Hi,
Besides daily backups, every month I should perform a full backup and transfer it to tape with a retention policy of 1 year to satisfy some legislative requirements. The backup should be performed while the database is running (a hot backup), so it should contain all the required archived redo logs to bring the datafiles to a consistent state. The only purpose of this "self contained" backup is to eventually restore the database as it was when the backup was taken - it's purpose is not to perform point in time recovery, only to have a snapshot on a certain date. Is there any way to achieve this?
I followed the examples on http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/backup.102/b14191/rcmconc1.htm#i1008255, but:
RMAN> BACKUP DATABASE KEEP UNTIL TIME 'sysdate + 60' NOLOGS;
but, I get:
RMAN-06533: KEEP ... NOLOGS option cannot be used when datafiles are fuzzy
Next, I tried:
RMAN> backup database plus archivelog keep until time 'sysdate + 60' nologs;
and I get
RMAN-06517: KEEP option is not supported for archive log backups
I certainly don't want to keep 1 year of redo logs, so that's why I used NOLOGS.
I even tried another trick. I made an icrementally updated image copy of the database so that all the image copies had the same SCN (in theory this should be equal to a cold backup) and then executed:
RMAN> backup as compressed backupset copy of database keep until time 'sysdate+60' nologs;
but I got:
ORA-19603: cannot backup or copy active file with KEEP .. UNRECOVERABLE option
I ran out of ideas :-(
The only solution I found would be this, actually a cold backup: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/backup.102/b14191/rcmbackp.htm#i1006840
Thank you in advance for any suggestions!
Regards,
Jure