About Oracle Database Autonomous Recovery Service

Oracle Database Autonomous Recovery Service is an Oracle Cloud service that protects Oracle databases.

With backup automation and enhanced data protection capabilities for OCI databases, you can offload all backup processing and storage requirements to Oracle Database Autonomous Recovery Service, thereby eliminating backup infrastructure costs and manual administration overhead.

The OCI Console provides a unified interface to configure your backup strategy. The options available in the Console centralize backup administration and monitoring for Oracle Cloud databases in your tenancy.

Note

  • The terms Oracle Database Autonomous Recovery Service and Recovery Service are used interchangeably throughout this documentation. Both the terms refer to the same service.
  • The term protected database refers to an Oracle Cloud database that uses Recovery Service for backup operations.

Recovery Service is designed to leverage the combined capabilities of the Oracle Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance and Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN).

RMAN enables a protected database to send backups to Recovery Service, and maintains the recovery window.

The recovery window is the period of time (in days) for which Recovery Service ensures backup retention for a protected database. The retention period (in days) is defined in a Recovery Service protection policy. You can recover a protected database to any time during the recovery window period. The interval always ends with the current time and extends backwards in time for the number of days defined in a protection policy.

Recovery Service processes backups, provides automated recovery validation, end-to-end encryption, and policy-driven backup retention. The continuous transfer of redo logs from a protected database to Recovery Service is called Real-time data protection. Recovery Service offers real-time data protection so that you can minimize the possibility of data loss and enhance database protection.

Protection policies and Recovery Service subnets simplify backup administration tasks. Each protected database must be associated with a Recovery Service subnet and a protection policy.

Protection policies enforce backup retention rules and enable efficient storage utilization. A protection policy can be a Oracle-defined policy or a custom policy defined by you as per your internal storage requirements. You can associate multiple protected databases to a single protection policy.

Recovery Service subnets provide network isolation for backup traffic between databases and Recovery Service in each virtual cloud network.

To summarize, you can leverage Recovery Service to:
  • Significantly reduce dependencies on backup infrastructure
  • Develop a centralized backup management strategy for all the supported OCI database services
  • Retain backups with Recovery Service for a maximum period of 95 days
  • Leverage real-time data protection capabilities to eliminate data loss
  • Significantly reduce backup processing overhead for your production databases
  • Implement a dedicated network for Recovery Service operations in each virtual cloud network (VCN)
  • Automate backup validation to ensure recoverability
  • Implement a policy-driven backup life-cycle management

You can select Autonomous Recovery Service as the backup destination for OCI managed automatic backups which is the preferred method for backing up Oracle Cloud databases.