Selecting Volumes with External Tools 

Use

You can also use external tools to determine the names of the volumes relevant for the backup. This could involve an external volume management system or simply a shell script. You can do this if you have deactivated BRBACKUP/BRARCHIVE volume management by calling the programs with the option -v . However, the expiration period of the volumes is checked anyway.

Prerequisites

The external tool that you use for volume selection must ensure that only non-locked volumes are suggested for backup. Otherwise, BRBACKUP/BRARCHIVE will terminate if they do not find enough free volumes. Make sure that initialized volumes are available for the backup.

Procedure

  1. Determine whether the required expiration period has been configured in profile parameter expir_period ; change the value when necessary.
  2. Start the BRBACKUP/BRARCHIVE backup with the option -v <volume list> . Before starting the backup, BRBACKUP/BRARCHIVE checks whether the mounted volumes agree with those in the volume list and whether the expiration period has expired.

Result

BRBACKUP/BRARCHIVE only use the volumes listed with option -v for one backup.

Activities

You can select the volume names yourself by defining them in the call with the option -v|-volume (naming convention, for example, as suggested for automatic volume management).

brbackup -v C11B141,C11B142,C11B143
brarchive -ssd -v C11A141,C11A142

You can also give the volumes other names. One option would be to include the day of the backup in the volume names. BRBACKUP/BRARCHIVE can use the following sample script to assign the volume names to the day of the month on which the backup was started.

<DBSID><X><dd><n>

DBSID=ORACLE_SID (name of the database instance), X=A for BRARCHIVE or X=B for BRBACKUP, dd=day of month, n=next volume number within one backup.

day= ` date | cut -f 3 -d " " `
if [ ${day} -le 9 ]; then day= ` echo 0${day} ` ; fi
brbackup -v C11B${day}1,C11B${day}2,C11B${day}3 -c
brarchive -ssd -v C11A${day}1,C11A${day}2 -c