About BLI backup and restore operations

A BLI backup performs database backups by obtaining the changed blocks identified by the Storage Checkpoints. BLI backups can also be performed while the database is online or offline. As with Storage Checkpoints, you must enable archive log mode to perform online BLI backups.

A BLI backup places the tablespaces in backup mode, takes a Storage Checkpoint, and then performs the backup. You specify how and when to back up the database when configuring the NetBackup notify scripts.

For example, suppose at 4:00 p.m. you lost a disk drive and its mirrored drive. A number of user tablespaces reside on the disk drive, and you want to recover all committed transactions up to the time you lost the drive. Because the BLI backup facility lets you perform more frequent backups, you did an online differential incremental backup at 1:00 p.m.

You recover by shutting down the database, installing new replacement disk drives, and restoring all the data files with NetBackup. Then you apply the archive logs to recover the tablespaces on the failed drive. If you used Fulldata Storage Checkpoints, the extra redo logs generated during an online backup are small, the media recovery part of the database recovery takes very little time. Moreover, because you have a recent backup, the entire recovery is accomplished quickly.