I'm in the process of revamping our backup system (which is mostly inherited from another DBA), and had a few questions about rman I've come across as I review the system. 1) 'copy' vs. 'backup'. In our current setup, we use the 'backup' rman command to handle the datafiles, and the archive logs, but 'copy' is used to backup the controlfile. The Oracle documentation says this: "In many cases, copying datafiles is more beneficial than backing them up, since the output is suitable for use without any additional processing. In contrast, you must process a backup set with a restore command before it is usable. So, you can perform media recovery on a datafile copy, but not directly on a backup set, even if it backs up only one datafile and contains a single backup piece." So am I better off just leaving the controlfiles (since they're small) handled by 'copy' instead of 'backup'? Is having to process a backup set containing one controlfile with a 'restore' command that much of an issue? Maybe making a backup set of a single controlfile is overkill? 2) Are there any "Best practices" documents with respect to rman that list members would recommend? Thanks again for your helpful comments, -- Dan ======================================================================== Daniel Hanks - Systems/Database Administrator About Inc., Web Services Division ======================================================================== ------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -------------------------------------------------------------