RE: Differential incremental backups - Do you really use them?

  • From: "Allen, Brandon" <Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "panibabu.mail@xxxxxxxxx" <panibabu.mail@xxxxxxxxx>, "oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 09:24:36 -0700

I still don't understand the hesitancy to use incremental backups even on 
smaller databases - they are very simple, and even on a small database can 
still add up to a significant savings of resources especially if you keep a lot 
of backups like I do.  I keep all daily backups for 35 days, all monthly 
backups for 13 months and all yearly backups for 7 years.  The monthly and 
yearly backups are full of course, but for the daily backups, I only do a 
weekly full and incremental all other days, so that cuts down the resource 
usage on my server, SAN, network and backup storage media by almost 6/7, or 85% 
and costs me nothing.  Running full backups all the time just seems wasteful to 
me.  If you're into the green IT movement, then that should be taken into 
consideration too - all that extra CPU and I/O activity means extra energy 
usage & cost too.  I doubt you take full backups of your PC every day - you 
probably do incremental backups instead, so why not apply the same idea to your 
databases?  It seems to me the typical approach is backwards - incremental 
backups should be the default, and daily full backups should only be used if 
there is some compelling reason to do so - for example if you tend to change a 
large percentage of the blocks in your database.

Regards,
Brandon

From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Pani Babu

looks like exceptionally large databases or backup and other infrastructure 
restrictions may leave one with no other choice than to use incremental backups.


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