Here comes another one of those extremely newbie questions... I have turned on archive logging for the first time, so of course I now have large archive log files piling up. I currently do my backups via the caveman begin/end backup method, because it works very well with Amazon EC2's snapshot feature. I eventually plan to implement RMAN backups as well, but have not done it yet. I have gathered from the reading I have done that archive logs do not need to be kept once a backup has been taken, but I'm not sure if that applies to the type of backups I'm doing or if it is only true if RMAN is involved. It seems logical that I would not need them; if I needed to recover back to before the last snapshot, I would just restore that and be done with it. Can anyone tell me what a reasonable deletion strategy would be for these log files? thanks, janine -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l