Parallel backup is possible to local or remote backup devices or to hard disks. If the backup devices used support hardware compression use this by setting the init<DBSID>.sap parameter compress = hardware . You can also make parallel backups with software compression ( compress = yes ).

When you perform parallel backups to several backup devices, BRBACKUP attempts to optimize the distribution of the database files among the backup volumes (load balancing).

• BRBACKUP attempts to optimize the activities to balance the load equally among all the backup devices. If this is not possible, it attempts to divide the dataset equally among the individual backup devices.
• Whenever possible, files from one disk are saved on one volume in one backup device, in order to minimize drive head movement during the backup.

BRARCHIVE only uses the parallel backup option to tape when you start archiving with brarchive -ss or brarchive -ssd . In this case, the offline redo log files for archiving are saved to both volumes in parallel (or saved and then deleted).

The addresses of the tape devices are defined in the init<DBSID>.sap parameters tape_address and tape_address_rew (or in tape_address_arch and tape_address_rew_arch ). If the -ss or -ssd option is used, BRARCHIVE only uses the first two tape devices in the list. The addresses of the directories on disk are defined in the init<DBSID>.sap parameter backup_root_dir .

• Device type:
  backup_dev_type = tape|disk|pipe
• Addresses for tape devices
  tape_address = (/dev/rmt/0hnc, /dev/rmt/1hnc)
  tape_address_rew = (/dev/rmt/0hc, /dev/rmt/1hc)
• Addresses for directories on hard disk:
  backup_root_dir = (/backup/dir1, /backup/dir2)
• Compression parameters:
  compress = no|software|hardware
• Tape size:
  tape_size = 1800M|1600M

The number of parallel copy processes normally corresponds to the number of backup devices available (tape devices, disks). This setting can be changed with the init<DBSID>.sap parameter exec_parallel or the command option -e|-execute .