Backup Often and Verify

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If you are lucky, you will be able to take your time putting in fixes and patches during your go live, during all of your upgrades, and during all patch application outages along your career. Realistically, you will not. Everyone is going to be in a hurry for the system. In a hurry for you to get done so they can take their time testing. In a hurry to make sure that everything is done and they can go on with life. That everything is back to stable and will not be going down again for quite a while. When you are applying a patch, performing an upgrade, or cloning from one system to another, you are down and down is a bad thing. Being down takes time. Time is money.

But do not get backed into a lose-lose position. Make sure you have a good backup of where your system is (even if it is somewhat broken and fairly unstable) before you start trying to install patches of any significant size. Even small patches are next to impossible to back out, but what if you have a big patch that runs for a while and it fails. Yes, you look on Metalink and you log an iTAR and you try to fix it. What happens when they do not know how to fix it? Do you have time for them to guess and hunt and guess some more and then tell you that they will need time to research it and they will get back to you? At some point, you will probably be in a position where you are at your wits end and frustrated with the lack of support. If you restore from that backup that was taken right before this 150 MB patch, what are you going to be out? A day or ten messing around with Metalink, the time it took to get you to where the patch broke, and the restore time. I have seen just such a scenario: Applying a patch right after restoring the system to where it was right before it broke and the patch ran clean. I'm not saying to restore every time a patch breaks, but if all else has failed, what do you have to lose? If you do not have such a backup, restoring is out of the question. Besides, it is never a bad thing to have a known point to return to.

There is a good feeling that goes along with knowing that you have a good backup to go back to if something should happen to break. Make sure you can get both the applications software and the database to the same point though. Otherwise you could be in worse shape after a restore than you were before you tried. Depending on your backup methodology and software solution, getting a backup to verify, while it will probably take nearly twice as long, will be well worth the extra time if you have to restore, just for the peace of mind that says they got everything, and it was successful.

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