John, Unless something has changed with 10g, and incremental backup doesn't actually save much time. Rman still has to read the block headers to see if the block needs to be backed up. It mostly saves space on disc if backing up to disk. Correct me if I am wrong! Ruth -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of John Smiley Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 11:19 AM To: richard.ignizio@xxxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: RMAN backups 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.