Originally posted by joyce_ank
What about scheduling this to run once a week. Do I need to schedule it on both nodes?
What about scheduling it once a week? Simply configure a batch script that calls your cold backup script and schedule it to run once a week using AT. However I don't see any point in taking regular *cold* backups once a week. In any production environment the database should be in archivelog mode, so there should be strictly hot-backup policy established. Cold backups simply don't have any "pros" compared to hot backups, they only have "cons". If you also take hot backups, there is simply no point in taking regular cold backups in addition.

As to schedule it on both nodes: maybe it would be vise to do so. As you don't actualy know on which node the instance will run at the time of backup, you should try to back it up on both nodes. Of course only one node will succeed, the other one will simply bomb out with some error messages. However be cautious! Both nodes are able to take your database group offline, but this is not what you actually want to happen. You should put some code at the beginning of your batch file that determines on which node the databes actualy runs (for example by trying to access the disks on which database files reside). If those disks are not reachable from that node, your code should exit the batch script before it actually tries to take the group offline. That way only the backup script at the node that runs the database wil succeed, the script on the other node will simply end without actually taking database backup.