Backup Automation and Storage in Oracle Cloud
Recovery Service stores backups in Oracle Cloud by default.
Recovery Service centralizes backup storage in Oracle Cloud. A protection policy based mechanism controls your database backup retention and storage requirements. You do not need to perform any manual tasks to address storage utilization or monitoring.
The OCI-managed automatic backups feature is the preferred backup method for Oracle Cloud Databases because you can easily configure the backup settings using the Console.
When you enable automatic backups for an Oracle Database Service resource, such as an Exadata Cloud Service instance database or an Oracle Base Database DB System, you can set Autonomous Recovery Service as the backup destination. You must assign a Recovery Service protection policy to automate backup retention, cloud storage location, and backup protection.
The database can then transfer backups to Recovery Service for complete and secure data protection.
You can create an on-demand long-term retention (LTR) backup with Recovery Service and retain the backup for up to 10 years. LTR backups are independent of the automatic backups and stored in the Object Storage Infrequent Access tier. You can restore an LTR backup to create a new database within the retention period.
Recovery Service enforces a single protection policy for each database. A protection policy defines the number of days to retain database backups for recoverability. A policy also allows you to set a preferred cloud location to store the backups (for multicloud Oracle Databases) and provides the option to set retention locking to safeguard the backups.
For multicloud Oracle Databases, such as Oracle Database@Azure and Oracle Database@Google Cloud, Recovery Service provides the flexibility to store backups in the same cloud location where the source database resides. See Multicloud Oracle Database Backup Support for more information.
Recovery Service includes a group of Oracle-defined protection policies (Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze policies) that cover typical use cases for backup retention. Optionally, you can create custom policies to suit your internal storage demands.
Custom policies allow the flexibility to retain backups for a period ranging from a minimum period of 14 days to a maximum period of 95 days. You can recover a database from backups up to until the retention period expires.
As a backup administrator for your Oracle Cloud Databases, you can use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Console to create and apply protection policies in your backup strategy. You can attach multiple databases to a single protection policy.