Right now we do a lot of our database backups offline without a TDP. Many of these will stay that way because they are very small databases and setting up the TDP is just too much work and cost. However, we are concerned about what this means from a filespace and backups point of view.
First of all, because we never perform an incremental against these filespaces we have no filespace statistics. Second, it is very difficult to monitor selective backups because you have to search the backups table for the entire filespace name and pick the last backup from it to get something similar. We have excepted these restrictions but we started thinking about what does this mean if an incremental accidentally got run so we are considering another approach. We believe we should be doing an incremental on every database filespace no matter what except do an exclude of every file, not directory, but file, ie. do not use the exclude.dir. However, we are concerned that this may expire all the selective backups. Before we tried it we thought we would ask what everyone else is doing. The other option would be to do a selective and then an incremental which would backup nothing because it did not change. There are only 150 files max in these filespaces anyway, so it is no big deal. You may wonder why we want to do it this way. Our plan is to segregate the database storage pools here so we can eliminate the reclamation churn. Basically, everything would expire all at once and the tape would be immediately empty. However, to make that happen, we must backup everything every time. 99% of the data files change anyway so incremental would do nothing. Paul D. Seay, Jr. Technical Specialist Naptheon, INC 757-688-8180
