Hi List, Wish you all a very happy and promising new year ahead. My apologies to Steve for hijacking his thread. I just have a quick question. I noticed on RMAN> list backup summary; under the level (LV) column, there are different values 0, 1, A and F. As I understand, 0 an 1 are RMAN backup levels 0 and 1 respectively. what does A and F stand for? Is A for Archived log? Thanks in advance. Thanks, Sundar ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield Sent: January 4, 2010 2:05 AM To: stbaldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: rman not purging backups properly You don't say what the older backups are, I'm guessing a mixture of full and incremental. a recovery window of 8 days doesn't mean "keep the last 8 days backups" it means "keep the files necessary to recover to 8 days ago or any more recent point" If you have a full and incremental strategy with say full only on the weekend you may have as many as 15 days worth of backups stored to meet that requirement - the full from 15 days ago is needed to recover to 8 days ago. Niall On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Steve Baldwin <stbaldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:stbaldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote: Can someone please tell me what I'm missing here ... [oracle@msdbc11 backup-scripts]$ rman target=/ Recovery Manager: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Sun Jan 3 14:08:41 2010 Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle. All rights reserved. connected to target database: RAC11D (DBID=1614933222) RMAN> list backup summary; using target database control file instead of recovery catalog List of Backups =============== Key TY LV S Device Type Completion Time #Pieces #Copies Compressed Tag ------- -- -- - ----------- --------------- ------- ------- ---------- --- 3264 B 0 A DISK 21-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091221T021704 3272 B 1 A DISK 22-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091222T001105 3280 B 1 A DISK 23-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091223T003814 3288 B 1 A DISK 24-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091224T002728 3295 B 1 A DISK 25-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091225T002459 3302 B 1 A DISK 25-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091225T232731 3303 B A A DISK 25-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091225T233803 3304 B F A DISK 25-DEC-09 1 1 NO TAG20091225T233807 3305 B A A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091227T054546 3306 B A A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091227T054546 3307 B A A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091227T054546 3308 B A A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091227T054546 3309 B 1 A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091227T054927 3310 B A A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091227T055838 3311 B F A DISK 27-DEC-09 1 1 NO TAG20091227T055839 3312 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T021305 3313 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T021305 3314 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T021305 3315 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T021305 3316 B 0 A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T021634 3317 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T025240 3318 B F A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 NO TAG20091228T025247 3319 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T232639 3320 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T232639 3321 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T232639 3322 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T232639 3323 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T232639 3324 B 1 A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T233452 3325 B A A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 YES TAG20091228T234517 3326 B F A DISK 28-DEC-09 1 1 NO TAG20091228T234526 : RMAN> delete expired backup; allocated channel: ORA_DISK_1 channel ORA_DISK_1: SID=16245 instance=rac11d1 device type=DISK RMAN> delete obsolete; RMAN retention policy will be applied to the command RMAN retention policy is set to recovery window of 8 days using channel ORA_DISK_1 no obsolete backups found RMAN> Based on the setting of a recovery window of 8 days, why haven't the backups dated 25-DEC-09 and older been seen as obsolete and deleted? I've since changed my purging setting to REDUNDANCY 1 and it purged everything I expected. Any ideas why the previous setting didn't work? Thanks, Steve -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info