Making User-Managed Backups of Miscellaneous Oracle Files

Always back up initialization parameter files, networking and configuration files, and password files. If a media failure destroys these files, then you may have difficulty re-creating your environment. For example, if you back up the database and server parameter file but do not back up the networking files, then you can restore and recover the database but will not be able to authenticate users through Oracle Net until you re-create the networking files.

As a rule, you should back up miscellaneous Oracle files after changing them. For example, if you add or change the net service names that can be used to access the database, then create a new backup of the tnsnames.ora file.

The easiest way to find configuration files is to start in the Oracle home directory and do a recursive search for all files ending in the .ora extension. For example, on UNIX you can run this command:

% find $ORACLE_HOME -name "*.ora" -print

You must use third-party utilities to back up the configuration files. For example, you can use the UNIX cp command to back up the tnsnames.ora and listener.ora files as follows:

% cp $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora /d2/tnsnames'date "+%m_%d_%y"'.ora
% cp $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/listener.ora /d2/listener'date "+%m_%d_%y"'.ora

You can also use an operating system utility to back up the server parameter file. Although the database does not depend on the existence of a particular version of the server parameter file to be started, you should keep relatively current backups of this file so that you do not lose changes made to the file. Note that if you lose the server parameter file, you can always create a new one or start the instance with a client-side initialization parameter file (PFILE).