Making User-Managed Backups of the Whole Database

You can make a whole database backup of all files in a database after the database has been shut down with the NORMAL, IMMEDIATE, or TRANSACTIONAL options. A whole database backup taken while the database is open or after an instance failure or SHUTDOWN ABORT is inconsistent. In such cases, the files are inconsistent with respect to the checkpoint SCN.

You can make a whole database backup if a database is operating in either ARCHIVELOG or NOARCHIVELOG mode. If you run the database in NOARCHIVELOG mode, however, the backup must be consistent; that is, you must shut down the database cleanly before the backup.

The set of backup files that results from a consistent whole database backup is consistent because all files are checkpointed to the same SCN. You can restore the consistent database backup without further recovery. After restoring the backup files, you can perform additional recovery steps to recover the database to a more current time if the database is operated in ARCHIVELOG mode. Also, you can take inconsistent whole database backups if your database is in ARCHIVELOG mode.

Control files play a crucial role in database restore and recovery. For databases running in ARCHIVELOG mode, Oracle recommends that you back up control files with the ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO 'filename' statement.

Making Consistent Whole Database Backups

This section describes how to back up the database with an operating system utility.

To make a consistent whole database backup:

If the database is open, use SQL*Plus to shut down the database with the NORMAL, IMMEDIATE, or TRANSACTIONAL options.
Use an operating system utility to make backups of all datafiles as well as all control files specified by the CONTROL_FILES parameter of the initialization parameter file. Also, back up the initialization parameter file and other Oracle product initialization files. To find these files, do a search for *.ora starting in your Oracle home directory and recursively search all of its subdirectories.

For example, you can back up the datafiles, control files and archived logs to /disk2/backup as follows:
```
% cp $ORACLE_HOME/oradata/trgt/*.dbf /disk2/backup
% cp $ORACLE_HOME/oradata/trgt/arch/* /disk2/backup/arch
 
```
Restart the database. For example, enter:
```
SQL> STARTUP
```
See Also:
Oracle Database Administrator's Guide for more information on starting up and shutting down a database