We have Oracle 9 installed on several different servers which we backup on a weekly basis through NIM. Problem with the backup is that I've had to add the oracle file system to the excludes for rootvg so it won't be backed up. If the FS is included in the back up the backup will always fail.

At first I thought it might be because there were open files, but it fails even if oracle is not running. I've checked the file size limits, which are set to -1.

I'm stumped and need to find a good way of backing up the server and include oracle in the backup.

Anyone seen this before?

loose,

Are you talking about the Oracle data files or $ORACLE home?

We normally create a separate VG for apps so that this stuff isn't in rootvg, and yet another VG for the data files, but obviously telling you that isn't helping you with your current issue.

I'm just thinking out loud on this next part. Not too familiar with NIM, but I'm guessing it's using the AIX backup command for the backups? You can't use tar, for example, with the Oracle data files because they are too large. To maintain POSIX compliance they have limited tar in this way and only support the backup command for files this large.

As a follow up to that....

If you're using mksysb to do the backups via NIM, it matters what version of AIX you're running.

Older AIX versions used the tar command in the mksysb script. As I mentioned above, tar is no good for large Oracle data files. If I remember correctly, files over 2GB in size are not supported for tar.

Newer versions of AIX use the "backup" command in the mksysb script, which would work for the Oracle data files.

We do something similar to the Tivoli concept of disk staging. Every night we copy out the Oracle data files to external storage arrays (IBM FastT) and then run the tape backups from those copies with something like this in cron:

30 4 * * 2,3,4,5,6 find /oraclebackup -print | backup -if /dev/rmt0 -q 1>/tmp/baklog 2>/tmp/bakprob

Don't know if this helps at all, but I'm just throwing some things out there.

Its the oracle binaries that I was having a problem with.

Figured it out shortly after posting. The backup was going over 2GB in size. I created a new filesystem that is large file enabled and moved everything over there. It seems to be working right now.

Are you doing online backups or offlinie backups (shutting down the Orcle database ?)