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Troubleshooting - Jobs Fail When Backing Up Databases that Contain Tablespaces With Duplicate Names

Valid on Windows Platforms.

Symptom

Backup jobs that contain Oracle databases as the source data and execute using the Oracle VSS Writer fail. The Oracle databases contain tablespaces with duplicate names that differ only based on case-sensitivity. For example:

SQL> select tablespace_name from dba_tablespaces;
tablespace_name
TABLESPACE_NAME

The following Arcserve Backup products are installed on the source computer:

• Client Agent for Windows
• Agent for Open Files

After you submit the job, the job fails and Arcserve Backup generates the following error messages in the Activity Log:

E12606 Unable to get the selected writer options

E12586 This VSS writer ( \\<host_name>\Oracle VSS Writer - ORCL ) has reported a failure on a freeze event.

Solution

The symptoms described above are expected behavior. Due to the duplicate tablespace names, the process of creating a snapshot of the database causes Oracle VSS writer to fail. Although Oracle distinguishes case-sensitive tablespace name as unique data, backups fail when the names of tablespaces are identical or differ only based on case-sensitivity.

To correct this problem, rename all tablespaces within a given Oracle database to unique names. For example:

SQL> select tablespace_name from dba_tablespaces;
tablespace_name
TABLESPACE_NAME1