recover from the cold backup files

[ashley75]

I have a quick questions about recover the datafiles to its original place when you recover the database. The question is how do you know which datafiles was in which drive if you have 6 drives on your server. I am running 8.1.7 on windows 2000.

Please advise

[np70]

ashley75,

AFAIK you can mount database. From v$datafile you can
see full name of file. copy backup files to their
proper location and then open database.

np70

[brhynold]

Another way that I had to do it one time was:

Make a copy of one of your control files, open that copy with notepad or wordpad and within it you can fine the datafile locations in plain text

[Glenstr]

Can you be a little more specific?

You want to know which directories to copy the backed up datafiles to?

select file_name from dba_data_files; should do it, if thats what you are trying to find out


hth

[marist89]

What, your backup software doesn't know where it backed the files up from?

[sambavan]

Looks like a script backup? You can see the datafile once you mount the database as "np70" said

Sam

[ashley75]

Thanks all for the feed back

I guess I am a little confused when you all said that mount the database and look into the V$datafile.

this is the case, I backup all of the data files to the backup server, say four of of the five disks on my database server crash and we got the server backup, now we need to copy the files back to the server before we can recover the database using backup control file to apply all of the archive log.

Please advise

[sambavan]

Ashly,

As other folks mentioned, if you can mount the database, then you would be able to use the view v$recover_files and v$datafiles to see which files need recovery. Considering the scenario, where your database has crashed basend on your specs, and you cannot even mount the files. On such case I would first try to restore a copy of the control file. Then make a copy of it and open it on an editor and see where the files were originally. Then restore the files one by one into appropriate places or would copy the files into the working disk and then use the

       alter database rename  file 'from_file_path' to 'to_file_path';

      or

      alter database create datafile '/disk3/DATA...' as '/disk1/DATA/...'
       recover tablespace tablespace_name
        alter tablespace tablespace_name online;

It all varies based on the scenarios....

Or you can perform the recovery on the whole database?

Sam

[ashley75]

thank you all for your reply,

I did some tests and find out you can't view the V$DATAFILES and V$RECOVER_FILES if your database in MOUNT stage.

what I am confused about is if you have 20 datafiles, how do you know which datafiles belong to which drive before you can copy these files backup to the drive from the backup server. It make more senses if you backup your control files when you run the backup so that we know exactly where the files belong to.

Any other advises.

Thanks

[Raminder]

Control file always needs to be backed up along with the other files. This should be an integral part of any backup strategy.