RS secondary server external backup

You can perform an external backup of an RS secondary server. Performing a backup of an RS secondary server blocks that RS secondary server, but does not block the primary server.

You can perform a logical restore from the logs backed up from the primary instance. The backup obtained from the secondary server cannot be restored with level-1 or level-2 backups.

Important: The external backup is not completed if the database instance contains any of the following:
  • Nonlogging smart large objects
  • Regular blobspaces
  • Nonlogging databases
  • Raw tables
If an external backup is performed on an instance that contains any of the previously mentioned items, then the backup is incomplete and cannot be used to restore the primary server.

If the backup fails because the checkpoint from the primary has timed out, you can use the BAR_CKPTSEC_TIMEOUT configuration parameter to increase the amount of time, in seconds, that an RS secondary server should wait for a checkpoint to arrive from the primary server while performing an external backup.