Disaster Recovery

Three Ways to Use Backups for Disaster Recovery across Regions in Oracle Cloud

Introduction

Oracle Data Guard provides zero or near zero data loss and a recovery time of just a few minutes. For unrecoverable failure, a restore from backup usually takes hours and restores your data to the last backup. If you have applications that tolerate the RTO and RPO provided by a restore from backup, having a copy of a database backup across regions is a viable and cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

Oracle Base Database and Exadata Database Services in Oracle Cloud provide automatic backups to an oracle-managed Object Storage bucket in the same OCI region. Backup replication and restoring across regions are not yet provided via Cloud Tooling.

This blog post discusses options for replicating your backups across regions and restoring the database in the remote region. These apply to Oracle Base Database and Exadata Database Service.

1. Manual Replication of Automatic Backups

Automatic backups can be enabled by the click of a button. The backups are stored in an oracle-managed Object Storage bucket in the same region. Currently, there is no option to replicate the backups across regions via Cloud Tooling. However, Oracle provides a utility called mv2bucket – Oracle Managed Bucket Content Manager (Doc ID 2723911.1) that enables you to access the oracle-managed bucket and replicate the backups into a customer-managed Object Storage bucket in another region.

Pros:

  • Automatic backup via Cloud Tooling.
  • Two copies of backups.
  • Restore in the local or remote region by accessing the Object Storage bucket in the same region.

Cons:

  • Manual scheduling of backup copy to a remote region.

A step-by-step guide is provided in this blog post.

2. Automatic Replication of Manual Backups

Create a manual backup via dbcli/dbaascli or RMAN using the Oracle Database Cloud Backup Module to a customer-managed bucket in the local region. Then use the built-in Object Storage Replication capabilities to replicate the backups to another customer-managed bucket in a remote region.

Pros:

  • Automatic replication of backups across regions.
  • Two copies of backups.
  • Restore in the local or remote region by accessing the Object Storage bucket in the same region.

Cons:

  • Manual backup configuration.

A step-by-step guide will be provided in an upcoming blog post.

3. Manual Backup to Remote Region

When configuring manual backups, you can choose a customer-managed bucket in a remote region as a backup destination. You need to make sure that network connectivity is provided from your database server to the remote Object Storage service.

Pros:

  • No need for backup replication to restore in a remote region.

Cons:

  • Manual backup configuration.
  • Only one copy of backups.
  • Restoring into the local region requires cross-region data transfer.

A step-by-step guide will be provided in an upcoming blog post.

Automatic Backup to Local Region

Automatic Backups store the backups into an oracle-managed bucket in the local OCI region. It’s possible to access the oracle-manged bucket via the Oracle Database Cloud Backup Module from everywhere to restore your database.

Pros:

  • Automatic backup via Cloud Tooling.
  • No need for backup replication to restore in a remote region.

Cons:

  • Only one copy of backups.
  • Only viable for planned database replication or migration. If a disaster hits the local region, the database and the backups will usually not be accessible anymore. This is why this blog post is titled “Three Ways … for Disaster Recovery“.

A step-by-step guide to restoring from automatic backup is provided in this blog post (however, across ADs here).

Considerations

  • It is recommended to use Automatic Backups. Switch to manual backups only if you need a configuration not (yet) supported by Automatic Backups.
  • You can use Archive Storage to save costs for manual backups via RMAN. However, this will increase the recovery time as you will need to wait up to one hour to start the restore.
  • Egress network traffic to the internet or across OCI regions is free for the first 10TB/month. After that, there is a charge of $0.0085 USD/GB/month.

Conclusion

You can replicate your database backups across regions to be used for restoration in a remote region if your application can tolerate the RTO and RPO provided by a restore from the backup. Both automatic and manual backups can be replicated to an Object Storage bucket in a remote region, with some pros and cons to be considered.

Further Reading

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