It's hard to get out of a chapter about managing a system without discussing backing up and disaster recovery. Again, an entire chapter could be filled with content on this subject, but that would be beyond the scope and intent of this book. Let's first be aware that backing up the FMW (that is, Oracle Home) folder structure and the Oracle BI artifacts is a good thing. The frequency is up to each organization, but once a week at a minimum is a good recommendation. Back up these items daily for high-availability or critical environments. Each application delivered with the Oracle BI Suite has its own backup consideration. Although OBIEE and BI Publisher comprise the main Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition software (don't forget Essbase, RTD, and the other analytics tools such as Interactive Reporting, and so on), they have some common metadata elements and some which are sole references.

If an outage were to occur after your Oracle BI environment has been placed in production, typically, the gross loss of effort will usually stem from any development in the RPD or Presentation Catalog artifacts. The .rpd file and the Presentation Catalog folder should be continually backed up in line with the development and deployment lifecycle. From a database perspective, the relational schemas created during the Oracle BI installation by the RCU will also need to be backed up. Typically, this falls into line with other backups conducted on the database server where these schemas reside. Using Oracle BI 12c's BAR-file export procedure with the ExportServiceInstance WLST command to back up the instance components, which include the RPD, Web Catalog, and Security application role assignments, is also a good measure to take. We also recommend using a Source Control Management system such as Git or SVN.

Ultimately, a full monthly BAR backup and a backup of the entire FMW folder structure is simply the minimum that should be done in any enterprise production deployment of Oracle BI. Disk storage is relatively inexpensive these days; rebuilding an environment due to an outage is not.