Hi
I am working on planning Backup and Recovery for a newly set up DB2 database and I need some help if the plan would be workable.

The plan is as follows:-

1. Logretain set to RECOVERY and USEREXIT set to NO
2. To do a full offline backup every night (say 8:30pm)
3. To backup the database log files several times a day (say every 3 hours)


The objectives I intend to achieve (in case a failure happens) are

1. Database can be restored from the last full offline backup and then roll forward to the point of failure assuming that we have all the logs backed up as per 3 above

2. If last full offline backup is not valid for some reason, we can restore from the previous night and roll forward all the log files upto the point of failure


Cheers
Satnam

Satnam,

It looks OK. I would also suggest that you use log mirroring. This is DB2 making copies of the logs for you. It is available in 8.1 for sure, and maybe in V 7 at some fixpack which I cannot remember.

Andy

If you use dual logging (mirroring) and put the logs on different physical disks (or different RAID arrays) then backing them up every 3 hours is probably not necessary. Also it is a good idea to put the logs on a seperate set of disks from the DB2 data, for performance reasons and for recovery reasons.

Hi Satnam,

why would you want to periodically back up your log files and not use the userexit, which would pass logs as early as possible to a presumably save storage and retrieve it back for you if you need them? We have been doing great with TSM, but any supported backup server would be ok.

Johann

hi there..
hope the following articles help:

userexit in DB2:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...0307kline.html


incremental backup strategies:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...5adamache.html

Thanks Everybody

Mirroring log file is a wonderful idea.

I have read about USEREXIT and being new to DB2, I really want to keep things simple to begin with. Moreover, I have been supporting Oracle Databases for last 4 years and we have these databases in "ARCHIVELOG" mode and we do cold backups every night and save the archivelog files for last 7 days (and also put them on tape). I thought it is good idea to keep DB2 backup plan similar to Oracle one so that it is easier for myself and my team to be on the same page.

I am delighted to know what I purposed will work for us and I will certainly use USEREXIT in future when we are a bit more learned on DB2.

Thanks Again
Satnam