Making User-Managed Backups of Offline Tablespaces and Datafiles

Note the following guidelines when backing up offline tablespaces:

• You cannot offline the SYSTEM tablespace or a tablespace with active rollback segments. The following procedure cannot be used for such tablespaces.

• Assume that a table is in tablespace Primary and its index is in tablespace Index. Taking tablespace Index offline while leaving tablespace Primary online can cause errors when DML is issued against the indexed tables located in Primary. The problem only manifests when the access method chosen by the optimizer needs to access the indexes in the Index tablespace.

To back up offline tablespaces:

1. Before beginning a backup of a tablespace, identify the tablespace's datafiles by querying the DBA_DATA_FILES view. For example, assume that you want to back up the users tablespace. Enter the following in SQL*Plus:

   SELECT TABLESPACE_NAME, FILE_NAME
     FROM SYS.DBA_DATA_FILES
     WHERE TABLESPACE_NAME = 'USERS';
    
   TABLESPACE_NAME                   FILE_NAME
   -------------------------------   --------------------------------
   USERS                             /oracle/oradata/trgt/users01.dbf
   
   

   In this example, /oracle/oradata/trgt/users01.dbf is a fully specified filename corresponding to the datafile in the users tablespace.

2. Take the tablespace offline using normal priority if possible because it guarantees that you can subsequently bring the tablespace online without having to recover it. For example:

   SQL> ALTER TABLESPACE users OFFLINE NORMAL;
   
   

3. Back up the offline datafiles. For example:

   % cp /oracle/oradata/trgt/users01.dbf /d2/users01_'date "+%m_%d_%y"'.dbf
   
   

4. Bring the tablespace online. For example:

   ALTER TABLESPACE users ONLINE;
   

   Note:

   If you took the tablespace offline using temporary or immediate priority, then you cannot bring the tablespace online unless you perform tablespace recovery.

5. Archive the unarchived redo logs so that the redo required to recover the tablespace backup is archived. For example, enter:

   ALTER SYSTEM ARCHIVE LOG CURRENT;