Backup times with RMAN are going to vary greatly depending upon the hardware and how many blocks need to be backed up. Even a very large database can be backed up incrementally if very few blocks have changed since the last backup with RMAN. What might be a better yardstick is backup rate. The fastest RMAN backup rate I've seen was published by Amazon a few years back. They attained 2TB / hour. John Smiley Technical Management Consultant TUSC, Inc.