I think you missed the upgrade to 10G. I believe the rman files in 10G are transportable (and usable) over different operating systems. In 9.2 they are not. And although you use samba for transporting files, oracle knows nothing about that and creates NT-files when you make a backup and tries to read Linux files when restoring the database. If you do upgrade to 10G, you can also use transportable tablespaces which are transportable over operating systems (only in 10, not in 9.2) if the tablespaces are 'self contained'. See http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/10gdba/week16_10gdba.html for a first look on the TTS feature. Maybe the answer to your last question is yes, rethink ;-). Eric Buddelmeijer. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l