It is helpful to know what operating system you are using.
But, basically, you want to use the probkup and prorest commands.
A probkup can be either offline or online. You will want to use the online option if you are running 24x7.
The "device-name" argument can be a file name. Many people first backup to disk and then use an OS utility to backup those files to tape. It is usually faster to do it this way and you have a handy "most recent backup" on disk ready to go if you should happen to need it.
I almost always use the -com option. The documentations says that it "compresses" the backup but what it really does is just eliminate empty space. It is
not doing compression in the sense of LZW et al.
If your database is large or you are on a platform which limits file sizes you may need to use multiple backup extents. The first extent is always specified on the probkup command line, additional extents are specified in a text file which you redirect into the command. Something like this:
Code:
$ cat /backups/dbname.list
/backups/dbname.pbk002
/backups/dbname.pbk003
/backups/dbname.pbk004
/backups/dbname.pbk005
/backups/dbname.pbk006
/backups/dbname.pbk007
/backups/dbname.pbk008
...
$ probkup dbname /backups/dbname.pbk001 -vs 125000 -com < /backups/dbname.list
If you need multiple extents remember that -vs is in units of db block size. If the above example is a database with 8k blocks each volume will be 2GB.
By the way... all responsible database administrators are also running with after-imaging enabled. Don't just backup. Make sure that after-imaging is enabled and that you know how to use it. Without after-imaging your exposure to data loss is
all of the data back to your last good backup -- which might not be the last one that you made (stuff happens, tapes go missing or turn out to be unreadable...) With a well implemented after-imaging system you can reconstruct everything up to the point of failure. Even if you lose a few tapes.