Veritas NetBackup™ for Oracle Administrator's Guide

Number of policies required for BLI backup

A database BLI backup requires at least one Standard type policy.

Only one backup stream is initiated for each backup policy during automatic backups. To enable multiple backup streams, define multiple policies for the same database. If you have more than one database SID, configure policies for each SID. If you intend to do simultaneous backups of more than one SID on the same file system, use Nodata Storage Checkpoints. Set the METHOD to NODATA_CKPT_HOT.

For example, to back up file systems F1, F2, F3, and F4 with two streams, you need to define two policies (P1 and P2) with F1 and F2 backed up in P1, and F3 and F4 backed up in P2. If you have one large file system that needs to be backed up with multiple streams, divide the files in the file system between different policies. After a file is added to a policy, it should stay in that policy. If you must rearrange the file list, do so only prior to a full backup.

If you have more than one policy defined for an Oracle database instance, NetBackup groups the database instance by the NetBackup keyword phrase. Identify one of the policies as the POLICY_IN_CONTROL in the NetBackup notify scripts. This policy performs database shutdowns and restarts. All policies with the same keyword phrase need to be configured to start simultaneously.

You can check the file systems on the backup client to see if they are included in one of the NetBackup policies on the server. To see if you need to add any new file systems to the NetBackup policies, run the following commands from the server on a regular basis, perhaps as a cron(1) job:

# cd /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/goodies/
# ./check_coverage -coverage -client mars -mailid \nbadmin

The preceding command generates the following output and mails it to the specified mailid:

File System Backup Coverage Report (UNIX only)
-----------------------------------------------
Key:      * - Policy is not active
  UNCOVERED - Mount Point not covered by an active policy
  MULTIPLE  - Mount Point covered by multiple active policies
  
CLIENT: mars
Mount Point  Device             Backed Up By Policy  Notes
-----------  ------             -------------------  -----
/            /dev/vg00/lvol3    production_servers
/home        /dev/vg00/lvol5    production_servers
/oradata1    /dev/dsk/c1t0d0    block_incr1
/oradata2    /dev/dsk/c1t0d0    block_incr1
/oradata3    /dev/nbuvg/nbuvol  UNCOVERED
/opt         /dev/vg00/lvol6    production_servers
/oracle      /dev/vg00/oracle   production_servers
/stand       /dev/vg00/lvol1    production_servers
/usr         /dev/vg00/lvol7    production_servers
/var         /dev/vg00/lvol8    production_servers

If there is an UNCOVERED file system that is used by Oracle, add it to one of the NetBackup policies so that all the necessary file systems are backed up at the same time.