A method of a quick nightly refresh of a training, stress testing or conversion testing system. We create a compressed backup to disk once, and then do a regular automatic restore every night using this backup. The compressed backup is about 20% of the original db. size. The backup uses 5 parallel streams to 5 devices. On a medium sized UNIX server the backup takes about 90 minutes, the restore takes 50 minutes. During the restore and backup the CPU is 100% utilized.(compressing) It is quite a robust procedure. THE BRBACKUP/BRRESTORE PARAMETER FILE (init.refresh): ######################################################################## # # # SAP backup to disk, restore from disk # # # ######################################################################## backup_mode = full backup_type = offline backup_dev_type = disk backup_root_dir = (?/backup1, ?/backup2, ?/backup3, ?/backup4, ?/backup5) compress = yes compress_cmd = "compress -c $ > $" uncompress_cmd = "uncompress -c $ > $" compress_dir = (?/backup1, ?/backup2, ?/backup3, ?/backup4, ?/backup5) cpio_disk_flags = -pdcu exec_parallel = 5 ************************************************************************* BACKUP FROM COMMAND LINE: brbackup -p /oracle/SID/dbs/init.refresh ************************************************************************* THE RESTORE SCRIPT (scheduled from crontab): # Stop SAP su - SIDadm -c "stopsap_hostname_00" wait # Send a page to the SAP admin team if SAP does not stop if [ -f /oracle/SID/dbs/sgadefSID.dbf ];then /opt/telalert/bin/telalertc -i admingroup -m Failure to stop SID exit 0 else # Remove the db. components find /oracle/SID -name "*.data[123456789]" -exec rm -f {} \; find /oracle/SID -name "*log*m*dbf" -exec rm -f {} \; find /oracle/SID -name "cntrl*.dbf" -exec rm -f {} \; wait # Do a restore su - oraSID -c "brrestore -m full -p /oracle/SID/dbs/init.refresh \ -c -b bcxwxjyd.afd" wait # Insert some error handling code here! # Start SAP su - SIDadm -c "startsap_hostname_00" # Insert some error handling code here! fi