Backup - How To Kill Brarchive Process

br002i brarchive 6.20 (116) br006i start of offline redo log processing: adtrwlau.svd 2006-10-12 20.29.52 br020e brarchive already running or was killed br021i please delete file /oracle/tbd/saparch/.lock.bra if brarchive was killed br022e setting brarchive lock failed br280i time stamp 2006-10-12 20.29.52 br301w sql error -257 at location brdbconnect-2 ora-00257: archiver error. connect internal only, until freed. br310w connect to database instance tbd failed

the .locl.bra file is a file that brarchive uses for its own logic. as the error message says all you have to do is delete this file and orun brarchive again. remember that you set your backup options to include a delete. otherwise your archive run will not solve your archive stuck situation. the file "lock.bra" is created every time brarchive starts to make sure only one session of brarchive is running at a time. when brarchive is ending successfully, it deletes this lock file, but when brarchive are killed or stops abnormally for some reason, it often fails to delete the lock file. the .lock.bra file is a simple locking mechanism to prevent multiple brar chive processes to run at the same time. when brarchive ends (even with a n error) it cleans up the file, but if it ends in an abnormal fashion (e. g. kill -9 or coredump) then the file will still be there and will cause the error that you saw. so the question to answer is: what happened to the brarchive that aborted ? as a first step just look at the timestamp of the lock file if it is st ill there. go through the most recent brarchive logs and see if there are any incomplete ones. also look for core dumps (or dr.watsons, since you seem to be on windows). if the fact of missing a single archive log backu p caused your archive log directory to fill up, then you may also want to increase the frequency of these backups.