Finding Incremental Backups (SAP Library - Database Administration (Oracle) with SAPDBA)

Finding Incremental Backups

Use

Choose Find incr. backup to search for incremental backups based on one or more full backups. You need to do this if you have just restored corrupt or missing files from one or more full backups.

Use incremental backups to reduce the amount of redo log files you need to import when you recover the database. After you restore the database you only have to import the redo log files that have been written since the incremental backup. This speeds up the recovery of the database.

	Find incr. backup
S	- Find appropriate incremental backup runs
a	- Select an incr. backup run for restore
b	- Show list of found incr. backup runs
c	- Show selected incr. backup run
q	- Return

You cannot use incremental backups to recover the database when:

Files were restored from partial backups or whole backups. Incremental backups use full backups (level 0) as their reference.
Backups were restored earlier in another Partial restore and complete recovery operation, however the operation was never completed as a recovery. This means that the information about the origin of the files has been lost. This also applies when corrupt or missing files were restored with a tool other than SAPDBA.

If you are sure that the corrupt or missing data files have been restored from a full backup then you can still use SAPDBA to search for incremental backups (you search in a restricted interval of time) and then restore them. If the restoration fails then you either chose an incorrect incremental backup, or a recovery with incremental backups is not possible.

Procedure

Choose:

Find appropriate incremental backup runs, to search for incremental backups.

Show list of found incr. backup runs to display a list of the incremental backups that SAPDBA has found.

Select an incr. backup run for restore to select an incremental backup from the list.

Show selected incr. backup run to display detailed information on the incremental backup that you have chosen.

You can skip the steps Find incr. backup and Restore incr. backup if you want. To do this, select the next step (for example Find offline redo logs) that has the status not finished.

Choose Return to continue with the recovery. The function Find incr. backup is assigned the status finished when the process is complete.