Hi Dragutin, many thanks for your doublecheck! And please excuse the delay, I was on vacation. > > This is a normal and expected behaviour, all files were restored and > recovered to their point in time,except the files that are unkown to the > control file used. One more reason to use the rman catalog. I have performed your test (the exact same steps) using a catalog - and now RMAN restores file 3 ( the one not in the autobackup controlfile any more) but the restore fails with ORA-19653: cannot switch to older file incarnation So I don't get something that "wasn't in the database at any point in time" now, but restore fails.... Or did you imply different steps to be executed/additional information to be extracted from the catalog? Best greetings Sigrid -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l