Most of the feedback on my archive log deletion question (thank you for all the answers!) focused on making sure that your last backup is good before deleting any log files. This makes perfect sense, but I would rather not write that script if I don't have to (define "backup is good" for all cases :). The second most common piece of advice was to let RMAN do it as part of the process of backing up. I just took a quick look at Oracle's Backup and Recovery doc to see what I would be getting myself into in using RMAN. Since this is an Amazon EC2 instance, there's no tape drive and my only choice is to back up to "disk" (really an EBS volume created for this purpose). From a quick scan, this doc looks like most technical docs, which is to say it tells you all about what you can do, but not what you should do. I don't want to read this entire thing from end to end and then figure out the best strategy; I'm sure someone else (or quite a few someone elses) have already done that. So... what's your favorite book/website/other resource on configuring RMAN for the first time? Thanks in advance, janine -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l