On Jun 22, 2010, at 12:11 AM, Dunbar, Norman wrote: >>> Ok, folks, I am very confused. > Welcome to RMAN! ;-) Thank you Norman, thank you very much!!! :) I suppose I should take comfort in this being a normal condition... > Maybe, your level 0 was actually a level 1 and that's why there are > missing archives? As I understand it, a level 0 copy will be made if one does not already exist, and since I had just deleted all copies and backups, that should have been the situation. Unfortunately, "list copy" and "list backup" don't seem to give me any information about the level, so I'll just have to assume that's the case. I think I see now where I went wrong with these archive logs in the first place. I naively thought that since I had not run any more RMAN commands, nothing new had been added to my backups. But in the output of "list copy" I see archive logs from today listed; they seem to be getting added to the catalog automatically. That's why the "delete copy" command deleted recent logs when I didn't expect it to. So, back to the situation at hand (the restore that is compromised by missing archive logs). I received a number of responses, mostly privately, and while I don't doubt that they are all correct I'm not sure which one is my best bet at this point. Here's what I got: - use "skip inaccessible" when making the backup - after running crosscheck I was supposed to run a delete command of some kind; suggestions of "delete expired" or "delete archivelog all" (the first one sounds safer :) I tried to find this (a requirement to follow crosscheck with delete) in the Backup and Recovery User's Guide but failed to locate it. Not that that makes it untrue, I just don't feel so bad now that I missed it. - run crosscheck on the specific logs that are lost, eg "crosscheck archivelog sequence between 2281 and 2416". Not sure whether this was supposed to be followed by a delete or not. - I may have run into the bug described in note 235973.1; according to the note my options are to a) use a recovery catalog or b) use the sequence clause of the restore commands to limit the sequences being restored - The error will eventually go away as the control file records cycle through. In case it matters, my retention policy is set to "redundancy 1" Thoughts? I should mention that this is Oracle 11gR2 EE on CentOS 5.2. thanks, janine -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l