Best Practices for backing up an RMAN catalog

We have been assigned the task of creating a new RMAN catalog repository database for our environment. We have approximately 150 databases in our present catalog, with some growth expected in the near-to-mid term.

For this new RMAN catalog, we will be able to build a Active Data Guard standby database in the near future (next month or so).

For the primary RMAN catalog database, what would be a best practice for backing up this database?

We were planning on doing two daily backups, via RMAN - one to a local file system partition, a second to "tape" (actually deduplication to a data domain).

We were going to create a second RMAN repository in another Active Data Guard environment, dedicated to just backing up the main RMAN catalog.

MetaLink note 452529.1 does seem to indicate that this should not be done, however (please see below).

We've come up with a few scenarios for backing up the RMAN catalog, but thought we would ask what other folks are doing.

Thanks,
Lou Avrami

MetaLink Note 452529.1:
How to backup of the Recovery Catalog ?

Recovery catalog database is just like any other database.This database backup need to be taken every time after the target database backup. You can take Physical backup or Logical backup of the catalog database.You can use RMAN for the backup of the recovery catalog database .

Few guideline for recovery catalog database

+ Run the recovery catalog database in ARCHIVELOG mode so that you can do point-in-time recovery if needed.
+ Set the retention policy to a REDUNDANCY value greater than 1.
+ Do not use another recovery catalog as the repository for the backups.
+ Configure the control file autobackup feature to ON.

How to restore and Recover recovery catalog from Backup ?

Restoring and recovering the recovery catalog is much like restoring and recovering any other database

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