Oracle Database Discussions

Hello everyone,

ok I am new at my company and I am trying to fix a problem that they had with RMAN backs prior to mejoining them.

We are 10g Stardard-One edition and non-RAC, non-ASM, non-Grid or non-OEM using, as well as no Data Guard either. We are doing everything from command line, and our backup RMAN scripts run out of crontab. Currently we are not using a RMAN repository DB either.

So back in Oct 2010, they had a major error/failure with their backup game plan. Then they hired me and I am in the process of fixing many different issues, and moving forward with many techs that we currently do not have or use.

Now currently we are using a 2 weeks retention policy for backups, where we do a Incremental level '0' on sundays and a level '1' the rest of the nights of the week. We are including in our backupsets both the database, and the archivelogs as well too. The only issue is they have all the archivelogs back to when they started doing RMAN Full backups (nightly) in October. I swithed it to incrementals '0' and '1's but we still have the archivelogsall included back to like october 8th or so included in each backupup set. Thus the space used is growing and etc. Now we also do a nightly backup to tape as well too, of all the mount points and that includes the archive logs too.

I would like to only include in the backupsets that run each night just 2 days or maybe I should include 7 days of archivelogs.

Here is my rman script entry:

run{
sql'alter system archivelog current';
BACKUP
INCREMENTAL LEVEL=1
DATABASE
PLUS ARCHIVELOG UNTIL TIME 'sysdate-7'
delete input
;
}

Now my believe is that the above syntax, would advance the current archivelog as the RMAN backup runs, then do a Incremental level '1' or '0' for that one, then for the purpose of this example in this backupset it would include all archivelogs starting from the current on that we caused to switch and back for 7 days? Now is that correct? next with the 'delete input' it will delete any archivelog older that the 7 days time frame. Am I correct here in my assumptions?

Also I have this next related RMAN issue with using/setting:

Ok I am looking in the Reference book of :

RMAN Recipes for Oracle Database 11g
A Problem -Solution Approach pg 247

I am trying to use there own listed example of:

RMAN> configure archive deletion policy
to backed up 2 times to device type sbt;

Now I wanted to use '4' times and backup to 'disk' instead, and using their listed syntax I am getting the following error:

RMAN> configure archivelog deletion policy to backed up 4 times to device type disk;
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00558: error encountered while parsing input commands
RMAN-01009: syntax error: found "backed": expecting one of: "applied, none"
RMAN-01007: at line 1 column 41 file: standard input

Now I am doing this is a 10g database, and also have the Oracle database 10g RMAN Backup & Recovery book by Oracle Press. I am looking on page 593 and it doesn't show a option of 'backed' ...it lists only 'Applied to Standby' or 'None' is this a 11g only option or is their some typo above.

What are people thoughts on these two issues?

I am hoping to get some specific answers to these two questions guys...

Thanks in advance