It's a different kind of snapshot, one specific to Amazon's EC2 hosting service. You have a virtual disk drive and use their API tools to take a snapshot of it, which is the standard way of doing backups. However, if the database isn't in hot backup mode the snapshot of those files is useless. Yes, I can and do back it up in other ways as well, but since I'm making the snapshots and paying for the storage anyway, I wanted them to be usable. It has been very handy when setting up instances for testing to be able to clone a new volume from a snapshot; I bring up Oracle on the new volume, issue the "end backup" command, restart Oracle (not sure why this is needed but it seems to be) and away I go. I couldn't restore any other kind of backup that fast. janine On Mar 16, 2010, at 8:56 AM, Guillermo Alan Bort wrote: > That is also possible using a physical standby database (or dataguard). For > the most critical databases we have a RAC and a standby DB. Backups are taken > from the standby db (we have at most 15 minutes of delay). > Alan.- > > > On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 6:13 AM, Harel Safra <harel.safra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 16/03/2010 02:46, Guillermo Alan Bort wrote: > You know... I am amazed when I see a 9i database backed up with 'begin/end'. > An 11g? I mean... come on! RMAN is very easy to set up for a disk backup. A > bit more difficult if a MML is involved, but that's about it. You can get > very complicated if you want to, but in general it's fairly simple. And you > wouldn't have hit this little problem ;-) > > Your forgetting that the OP wanted to take a storage snapshot of his > database. The only supported way to do that is to shut down the database or > put it in backup mode. > > RMAN is fine if you want your backups to run on your production servers. If > you want to offload backups to a backup server you need to move the data > there, usually using split mirror backups (snap/clone/BCV/...) of the > database that are done with alter database begin/end backup. > > Harel Safra > --- Janine Sisk President/CEO of furfly, LLC 503-693-6407