At Wed, 21 Jul 2004 21:31:46 +0100, "Nigel P. Longbottom" <not@all.valid> writes:

> Luckily we had Sun Gold Support so logged a call and received
> a helpful chap who, after getting all the relevant details i.e. Explorer
> files etc, said that the problem was that I was doing a UFS dump with the
> filesystem mounted and that Sun didn't recommend that.
>
> I asked if he was serious and he suggested that if I unmounted the
> filesystems, I could get a proper backup.

You have Sun Gold support. You have the right to competent advice,
but you're not getting it. Sounds like you should be going up the
management chain on this one. You wouldn't be doing Sun any favors by
letting this sort of service go without complaint.

If you'd like better advice about how to do backups of Oracle on
Solaris, you might start with the Sun Blueprint series of
best-practice documents. E.g., see Art Licht's paper
<http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0802/816-7395-10.pdf> and Selim Daoud's
<http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0702/816-5243-10.pdf>.