Very reasonable. Compression can do wonders for the size of backup sets! It can also significantly improve overall backup times. What were your times for the backup compressed and non-compressed and how much of a difference in CPU did they make. Be aware that someone on here mentioned a bug with compression just a few days ago.I looked in Metalink for compression related bugs and found a few. In a very quick looksee I find most the bugs seem to be related to backups as opposed to restores. So it seems if you can get a good backup, then you might well be ok. As always, test test test, your restores. No piece of software is perfect! :-) On a regular basis continue to test your restores just in case a bug creeps in. My personal experience with Compression has been very positive. Robert Robert G. Freeman Author: OCP: Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Professional Study Guide (Sybex) Oracle Database 11g New Features (Oracle Press) Portable DBA: Oracle (Oracle Press) Oracle Database 10g New Features (Oracle Press) Oracle9i RMAN Backup and Recovery (Oracle Press) Oracle9i New Features (Oracle Press) Other various titles out of print now... Blog: http://robertgfreeman.blogspot.com The LDS Church is looking for DBA's. You do have to be a Church member in good standing. A lot of kind people write me, concerned I may be breaking the law by saying you have to be a Church member. It's legal I promise! :-) ________________________________ From: Jeffrey Beckstrom <JBECKSTROM@xxxxxxxxx> To: oracle-l-freelists <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; oracle-db-l <oracle-db-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 7:36:52 AM Subject: compressed backup - is this a reasonable size Just ran the following command. This is our first RMAN backup. It backed up a 17G database into about 3G of files. Is this reasonable????? backup as compressed backupset database plus archivelog delete input; Backup states it finished normally. Jeffrey Beckstrom Database Administrator Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority 1240 W. 6th Street Cleveland, Ohio 44113