Since I spent the day tracking down this phenomenon, I want to revisit this “cosmetic” issue. Reference: year old Symantec tech192934, “Oracle backup set is not available in Storage tab under backup set if backup is on tape device”, which a friend eventually located for me.
In this tech bulletin where it’s discovered that oracle backup sets display differently on tape media than disk, disk shares or disk deduplication storage and that this is a cosmetic issue that probably isn’t going to be fixed.
I say that it’s not just cosmetic. Say I have a tape with many backup sets on it including oracle backup sets and I need to duplicate it or move the sets to another storage location. I can’t select the oracle backup sets from the storage view to duplicate them. I would need to find each server that has an oracle backup set on the tape and go into the server in the Backup and Restore tab and find the date and time of that set and duplicate that. Difficult and mistakes would be easy to make. What if I needed to duplicate these sets on a different be2012 install instead of the original server that had the set information? I would need to catalog the tape and hope that the oracle database set shows up under the Backup and Restore tab first. I did a little experiment today.
I deleted the tape backup sets for the drive, system state and oracle database from the Backup and Restore tab for the oracle server. The drive and system state sets disappeared on the storage view as expected. The oracle database backup set was never shown in that view. Since the backup sets are on tape, they sets aren’t actually deleted and just need to be recataloged for recovery. I ran an inventory and catalog on the tape and in the Backup and Restore tab the drive and system state sets reappeared, but NOT the oracle database backup set. The system state and drive backup sets also returned to the storage view. Now the oracle backup set can’t be seen on the Backup and Restore tab or the Storage tab. Now what? It doesn’t seem cosmetic now. What do you think?
Tech192934 Article is mostly reposted below:
Oracle backup set is not available in Storage tab under backup set if backup is on tape device
Solution
Workaround:
This is a cosmetic issue and backup/restore functionality of Oracle database is not impacted by this issue. The Oracle backup sets are visible in the "Backup and Restore" tab under the Oracle Server even if backup is on tape as shown in the following figure:
Symantec Corporation has acknowledged that the above-mentioned issue is present in the current version(s) of the product(s) mentioned at the end of this article. Symantec Corporation is committed to product quality and satisfied customers.
There are currently no plans to address this issue by way of a patch or hotfix in the current or previous versions of the software at the present time. This issue may be resolved in a future major revision of the software at a later time. However, this particular issue is not currently scheduled for any release.