Oracle 9i – delete Archive Logs without any concerns

archiveloggingoracle

I have an Oracle 9i which creates Archive Logs since the year 2007. Can I delete them without any concerns? Or do I need to tell Oracle something before I delete them?

(From time to time I do a cold backup of the database.)

Thanks,

Tobias

Best Answer

Archived logs are used to do a point in time recovery. Say you have backups on Jan 1st, Jan 8th and Jan 15th. If you wanted to restore your database to the point it was on Jan 10th, you'd reload the Jan 8th backup, and use the archived logs from between the 8th and the 10th to bring the database up to that point in time.

If you never want to go earlier than your last cold backup, you could delete all archived log files from prior to when that cold backup was taken.

Archived logs are also used during a hot backup. Since the database itself is operation during the time of the backup, then additional information is written to the log files during the course of the backup, so you want to (at least) keep log files generated from when the backup started.

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