Archival process

[jlakhani]

Hello,
I have just turned archiving on. (a scenario)
Now I am not an expert at this but I understand this much. I took a backup today morning then turn archiving on and let the users pound on the db. Arch process takes redo logs and writes them to arc. this comming up sunday i want to restore till thursday at a certain time then can i get any suggestions on how to do that?

I also need to learn about RMAN. Any suggestions on how to setup and use?

[sreddy]

I am just giving hint here and you refer documentation for exact steps. You can use point in time recovery. I mean till a particular time, May be till Midnight THURSDAY, applying your logs till that point of time.

[marist89]

You almost got it.

Turn archiving on BEFORE you take your backup. This way, you can be sure that you will be able to recover from that point in time. Otherwise, there may be a gap in the SCN numbers between the time you took the backup and the time you turned archiving on (however minute, oracle can't skip a database change).

[jlakhani]

so MARIST are you saying that
once a week passes with archiving running. I bring down the database which shutsdown the archiving. Take a cold backup and backup the archives?

[maachan]

Whenever you turn archiving on for a database, you must take a backup right afterwards, before any transactions have been done. You cannot use a backup taken while the database was in noarchivelog mode to restore a database that has been put in archivelog mode.

Consider the following scenario:
1) database in noarchivelog mode
2) cold backup
3) turn archiving on
4) cold backup
5) open up to users
6) hot backup
7) database crashes

Database can be restored using archived logs and hot backup from step 6 or cold backup from step 4.
Backup taken at step 2 cannot restore database to the state it was right before it crashed.
It will only restore to the state it was at step 2. Archived logs cannot be applied to a cold backup taken when the database was in noarchivelog mode.

hope this clears it up