I still don't understand the hesitancy to use incremental backups even on smaller databases - they are very simple, and even on a small database can still add up to a significant savings of resources especially if you keep a lot of backups like I do. I keep all daily backups for 35 days, all monthly backups for 13 months and all yearly backups for 7 years. The monthly and yearly backups are full of course, but for the daily backups, I only do a weekly full and incremental all other days, so that cuts down the resource usage on my server, SAN, network and backup storage media by almost 6/7, or 85% and costs me nothing. Running full backups all the time just seems wasteful to me. If you're into the green IT movement, then that should be taken into consideration too - all that extra CPU and I/O activity means extra energy usage & cost too. I doubt you take full backups of your PC every day - you probably do incremental backups instead, so why not apply the same idea to your databases? It seems to me the typical approach is backwards - incremental backups should be the default, and daily full backups should only be used if there is some compelling reason to do so - for example if you tend to change a large percentage of the blocks in your database. Regards, Brandon From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pani Babu looks like exceptionally large databases or backup and other infrastructure restrictions may leave one with no other choice than to use incremental backups. ________________________________ Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message or attachments hereto. Please advise immediately if you or your employer do not consent to Internet email for messages of this kind. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of this company shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by it.