DA Corporate

It is very difficult to get a good, complete backup of Oracle data due to the following factors: 

1. Oracle databases are composed of a number of files which can be located in separate drives and/or directories. 
2. ALL Oracle tablespace files must be backed up together along with the appropriate control and redo logs. 
3. The Oracle service MUST be shutdown in order to backup many of these files.

To work around these problems, we recommend that the customer regularly use the Oracle Export command to extract all their data to an Oracle "dump" file. Dump files have the following advantage over other backup methods:

• Dump files can be created while Oracle is running.  In fact, users can be posting entries to Oracle at the same time that the dump file is created.
• Dump files can be used to restore a database on another driver or even on another machine.

This batch file will assist customers in creating their backup dump files automatically. This batch file will keep the most recent 24 dumps before deleting older dump files. The newest dump file is named exp01.dmp, the next is exp02.dmp, etc.

Using either the Windows NT AT command or the Windows 2000/2003 schedule command, the user should schedule this batch file to run when the machine is at low utilization (e.g. - lunchtime or late at night). The export goes fairly quickly and users can continue to use Oracle when it is running; however, it will really slow down a machine when it is running.

If creating a scheduled task in Windows 2000/XP, the user may need to launch this batch file using the cmd.exe command shell. Here are some settings for the Scheduled Task (see Control Panel):
cmd /c c:\orabackup\oracleexport.bat c:\orabackup
--- OR ---
cmd /c "c:\orabackup\oracleexport.bat c:\orabackup"