The lesson is that no matter what backup and recovery strategy you implement, make sure you test, test, test, so that when disaster strikes, you are not putting your fate in the hands of the gods.

I use RMAN to back up approx 70 Production databases every night, and it works flawlessly. The longest part of our recovery is physically getting the tapes from offsite. The actual restore itself is quick and painless, and compared to doing a user managed file system backup, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process.

If you don't use RMAN, your other option would be a file system backup (i.e. user managed backup, no metadata about the backups other than the filenames and dates), or exports (ineffective for disaster recovery).

I used to hate RMAN - it was buggy, was known to corrupt backups, and was next to impossible to understand. Most of these problems are long gone, but the bad reputatation has stayed with it. I now use RMAN almost exclusively - the only thing I don't currently use RMAN for is cloning from Prod to Dev, and this is only because I have not had the time to test the RMAN Duplicate process between our Prod and Dev servers.

If it has been some time since you used RMAN, I can honestly say I think you should give it another look. You may be surprised.

Paul



*********** ORIGINAL MESSAGE ***********

On 29/03/2005 at 1:06 PM Phil Morris wrote:

You are right they can be recovered, it takes a LONG!!!! Time but they
can be recovered. My biggest beef with RMAN is if anything goes wrong
there is no other way to recover the database. Also if you call Oracle
about a problem with RMAN it takes days to get them to fix it. I don't
know about the rest of you but I have never had days to recover a
database. If it takes more than a few minutes you have the CIO or a Sr
VP standing behind you tapping his toe.

I guess the best answer I have is that I like products that make me look
good RMAN does not fit that mold. It is all about options, the more
options a DBA has to getting the datbase by up the better off they are.
RMAN limits my options to ONE.



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