Paula, I wrote korn scripts to perform rman backups to disk followed by gzip'ing the resulting file. We keep about one weeks worth of backups on disk (3 backups). The directory is backed to tape nightly. I have another script that simply removes files from this directory (things more than 9 days old). If you need a file from tape, the sysadmins will need to get it for you. The bad news is that you need about 2.5 times of disk space for this type of setup. But Ruth is correct. The Rman backups run in about 15 minutes. Tom ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Paula_Stankus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 2:30 PM To: breitliw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; mgogala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: Patty.Charlebois@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: backups to disk Wanting to do our backups to disk as tape media and hware so unreliable and system admin group wants us to have them run our backups and restores which would just slow down the whole process Any way to keep storage costs down considering one week worth of backups and using all the tricks for types of tablespaces and backups??? -------------------------- Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld