Ryan Lot of ideas have been given about this thread. Autobackup is one good concept. It is preferred you put the dbid as part of the media handle or wherever you can plug that in. If you have the logfile, you can restore the control file as rman nocatalog , connect target, set dbid , restore controlfile from 'cf_respective_handle'; This will give you a good starting point. Then etc and restore the db. Optionally you can backup/restore your spfile too [1]http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96565/rcmsynta46.htm#93304 If you do not have backup of the init.ora /spfile you would need to create one. HTH GovindanK On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:42:39 +0000, ryan_gaffuri@xxxxxxxxxxx said: I am using RMAN without the repository. I want to plan in case we have a total site loss and all I have left are my tape backups which are all compressed backupsets. So my control files with my catalog are gone. What do you recommend as the best way to recover if this happens? Should I backup my control files seperately on top of the backupset? Should I do backup controlfile to trace? References 1. http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96565/rcmsynta46.htm#93304