Niall, thanks for your response.The only time I would possibly want the offline would be to create a before-image serverbackup, prior to a major application upgrade, to be used to restore the server to before-upgrade image if something went wrong. Otherwise, the online rman backups are run daily. Thanks, Don ________________________________ From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx> To: dmorse2@xxxxxxxxx Cc: Listserv Oracle <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 2:53 AM Subject: Re: cron backups on RAC Just curious really about why you might wish to have an offline backup at all. It's probably also worth noting that if you use the snapshot controlfile feature of RMAN then, starting with 11.2.0.2 that needs to be on genuinely shared storage (tape obviously counts, but most people probably use disk for this purpose) -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l