I have been thrown in at the deep end and given an Oracle 9i instance to manage. I have some SQL experience but very little on Oracle of any version.
We are currently backing up the database by doing a clean shutdown, copying all the files to a network location and then restarting the Oracle instance.
I have found approx 500GB of .arc files. My understanding is that these are the archived redo logs and are needed by RMAN to do restores, as we are not backing up using RMAN can I remove these file (or at least most of them) to free up disk space. Is there anything I need to do to tidy up after removing them? The plan will be to move to an RMAN backup strategy once we have shrunk our database (a work in progress with the supplier).
As I said before we backup all the files whilst the DB is shutdown, the current recovery plan is to just copy the files back and recreate redo logs etc. This has been tested by bringing up a copy of the backup on another server. Do I need to be backing up the tempDB file as this is currently 30GB and would save a lot of time during the backup.
Thanks
Alastair French
Cobham Wireless