Oracle's recommended backup strategy

A rolling updated full backup strategy has its place in a production environment. Here is a short list of the best reasons and features:

• It reduces the number of repeated full backups

• It can reduce the restore time if switch to copy is used

• It reduces network bandwidth to transport backups offsite and incremental(s) take up less space

• Improved Tape bandwidth due to less reads

• Option for restoring objects changed with NOLOGGING option because changed data blocks are captured

• It synchronizes the physical standby with incremental merge changes

• There is no need to modify CONTROL_FILE_RECORD_KEEP_TIME

• It's useful for merging monthly datawarehouse backups with transportable tablespaces

Issues with incremental merge backups

Just as there are positives to Oracle's recommended method of backups and recovery, there are also some downsides that need to be covered:

• The amount of disk storage needed is higher for the image copy backup versus a single full RMAN backup. That...