Recovering primary DB

Hi listers,

Looking for a quick confirmation here - I think this should be possible, but 
like to confirm it before I start down this route.

We had a SAN failure on a primary DB (10.2.0.3 RAC). Failed over to (physical) 
standby as the quickest way to get the system going again. Looking at the 
backup history of the primary, the most recent full backup is several days ago. 
The bandwidth between the two datacenters where primary and standby reside is - 
well, transferring a full backup of standby to primary might well take 96 hours 
or so.

I'm hoping to do the following as a way to get the system back to its normal 
state:

1)      Restore the full backup of primary now that the SAN issue has been 
resolved.

2)      Take an incremental backup of standby (which is now running as primary) 
and use that to recover primary - obviously there are transactions occurring in 
standby now that would need to be applied to primary before we could switch 
back.

3)      Switch back

I can't imagine any reason this wouldn't work, but I've never tried in this 
direction before. Applying incremental backups of primary to standby is 
something I've had to do more times than I like to think about - so I'm 
familiar with the process.

Can someone confirm this will work? Any caveats?

Thanks!

Stephan Uzzell

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