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Oracle Archive Logs Retention

david_beachboar
Level 4

Hello all.  We have Managers high up they say we need to keep all Oracle Archive Logs for infinity to tape.  We backup thousands and thousands of Archive Logs a day and they have been sent to tape for years using netbackup. Does this sound way over board.  Some of the DBA's say this is rediculaus.  I am no DBA so I am not 100% sure what these archive logs ae for.  Does anyone hear know a DBA or is a DBA thant can help me convince them that infinity is to log? 

3 REPLIES 3

pats_729
Level 6
Employee
Hi
Your DBA said it right... it’s rediculas !!!
archive logs are helpful in performing point in time recoveries which is likely to be performed in case of a disaster. However retaining logs infinite is of no use as you would never want to perform a point in time recovery 5 or 10 years old state. You can still achieve this by restoring a 5 or 10 year old FULL backup.

If it’s your company’s agreed RPO then you must follow it or else you can suggest a revision in retention policies.

X2
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP   

What @pats_729 said. Your manager should ask for an RPO from his manager in writing and not just words. We keep archivelogs for 1-3 months and Full/Diff backups are kept from 3months to several years. Find out the RPO and add a buffer to it to be on safer side to get a retention figure for archivelogs. Other things to keep in mind are compliance and litigation hold.

One good way in corporate world for the managers high up to make an informed decision about how long to keep the archivelogs would be to provide them numbers in $$$ about how much it costs to keep them to infinity.Keeping two copies of archivelogs on tapes for 10 years will definitely add up with frequent archivelog backups!

BTW, infinity retention date just changed from 2038 to 3000 in NetBackup 9.0

 

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

My take on this:

Keeps archive log files as long as you keep Oracle backups *

It does not make sense at all, to keep archive files longer than the database backups. 

* There is more to it, if oracle backup also contain archive files to perform media recovery, then archive files can be kept shorter. I would say the sweet spot for point in time recovery = 1-3 months.