How Journal Archiving Works

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The purpose of journal archiving is to provide effective and efficient disaster recovery. As mentioned above, a journal archive is a directory that contains a full database dump and all of the completed journal files that have been archived since that dump. As such, a journal archive enables you to recover to the last committed transaction in the most recently archived and completed journal file.

Important: For disaster recovery purposes, a journal archive should always be located on a different machine — ideally, in a remote location — than the one that houses the database server.

Only completed journal files are archived to the archive directory. This means that up to the moment recovery is possible when the hard drive that contains the current, active, unarchived journal file remains intact. However, if disaster wipes out the hard drive that contains the active, incomplete journal file, the data on that file will also be lost.

Note: Before you can activate journal archiving, you must first enable journaling. For instructions on how to do so, see Enabling Journaling and Creating Journal Files. For instructions on how to activate journal archiving, see Using Journal Archiving.