Re: Best Practices for backing up an RMAN catalog

this may not be the answer you had in mind for your question, but maybe nevertheless it can give a little input. Because personally, I don't get the point with the wide-spread panic regarding the RMAN catalog. I assume, you have a very large environment with a few hundered databases, to make any sense here.

In general, RMAN backup/recovery is of good nature and quite simple. Please bear some facts in mind:
1. RMAN stores every information you need for a retrieval of your backup pieces in the local catalog (residing in control file of the database in question).
2. You need a backup of this control file anyway. If you back up your control file in a seperate step in your backup script, you'll never have trouble to identify it after loosing everything but your backup target. 3. If you should be unfortunate enough to end up with an old controlfile without having the most recent backups catalogued, it's very simple to catalog a bunch of backup pieces on media, as long as you know something  they have in common (directory, naming, etc.) - that's all stuff that HAS TO BE in a decent system documentation anyway.

So what do we loose if we don't have the RMAN catalog database any more? There may be stored scripts, and loosing this automatism may make fully automated retrievals in complex environments more complicated. Agree. But for 99% of all users, a catalog DB is unnecessary system overhead.

My conclusion, there's nearly no need for a catalog. But if you insist on having one, run the DB for it in ARCHIVELOG mode, do a frequent RMAN backup to disk or tape (last step is backing up the CF), document the targets and settings, and if you really should loose it, replay your last controlfile after looking up its location - it will take less than 5 minutes.

Best regards
Martin Klier

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

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