Did you mean 700GB instead of MB as over 2400:1 compression is amazing even with repetitive data and empty blocks. Also if you configure you backup to have a maximum number of files per backup piece this irritation can be minimized. In our case we use 4 files per piece as a maximum, so if we need to restore one file we only have to uncompress 4 rather than 200. Ken From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jason Heinrich Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 10:38 AM To: JBECKSTROM@xxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l-freelists Subject: Re: compressed backup - is this a reasonable size Yes, RMAN backup compression is typically quite good. I've had a 2.4 TB database backed up into <700 MB. The downside is that restoring the compressed backup set can take a lot more time, which is particularly irritating if you only need to restore a single datafile. Of course, you should test the restore to prove that it was successful. -- Jason Heinrich On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Jeffrey Beckstrom <JBECKSTROM@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 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