RMAN may not backup the empty blocks if you're doing incremental backups, but there is a big time to complete backup cost verifying blocks have never been used. Also, rman will backup an empty block if it was ever not empty. -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jared Still Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 12:29 PM To: ora_forum@xxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: AUTOEXTEND If your storage is already dedicated to the database, and your backups are via RMAN, you could just extend the files out to use all available space. RMAN doesn't backup the empty blocks.