OCOPY

Usage:

ocopy from_file [to_file [a | size_1 [size_n]]]ocopy -b from_file to_drive
ocopy -r from_drive to_dir

Metalink Doc Id 139327.1

The Differences between Windows NT COPY and Oracle OCOPY When Doing Backups:

When doing an online backup, should you use the Windows NT COPY command, or the Oracle OCOPY command?

While doing online backups you should use OCOPY, or Oracle7 EBU, or Oracle8 (and later) RMAN.

With the OCOPY command you could copy to a backup directory on the hard drive but cannot use OCOPY to copy a file to tape.

The other option if you do not want to use ocopy to perform your backup as this does require a lot of disk space is EBU/RMAN that comes with Oracle.

Depending on your Oracle version, the distribution includes a utility called EBU (Oracle7) or RMAN (Oracle8 and later) that can be used for online recovery as well. You will need to use a media management product to move the data from RMAN to tape.

Legato Storage Manager is provided however there are other products that are supported to be used with this tool. To backup you will need to use the utility delivered by Oracle, the ocopy command.

Utilities like the NT commands copy, xcopy CANNOT be used to back up.

The Windows NT feature to be aware of is that NT Backup does not allow files in use to be copied, so you must use the OCOPY utility that Oracle provides to copy the open database files to another disk location.

Since OCOPY cannot copy files directly to tape, you will then need to use NT Backup or copy or a similar utility to copy the files to tape, as required.

OCOPY allows writing to continue while the backup is running. The NT COPY is a closed copy and the files may be marked either as "fuzzy" or "corrupt."

Ocopy opens the file using CreateFile () with the FILE_SHARE_READ and FILE_SHARE_WRITE flags. This allows writing to continue while we take the backup. Applying archived redo during recovery repairs inconsistencies in the backup.

The 'copy' command from NT doesn't use these flags since it wants to prevent writes to the file while the copy is taking place.