RMAN archivelog backup fails

I'm scheduling backups using RMAN 8.1.7 in nocatalog mode to backup a database and its associated archived logs. The database backup completes and then validates sucessfully, however the archive log backup fails with ORA-19599: block number xxx is corrupt in archived log yyy. Consequently my archived logs quickly fill up the disc and I have to manually intervene, a little to frequently for my liking.

I can ignore datafile block corruption errors using the NOCHECKSUM option or "set maxcorrupt for datafile "xxx" to y" but can't find any references in the rman manual (or others) to ignoring corrupt blocks in archived logs. The NOCHECKSUM option is permitted in the backup script but fails to prevent the error and the backup still fails. And I can't fool RMAN into treating the archived logs like datafiles and using set maxcorrupt.

My database has both LOG_BLOCK_CHECKSUM and DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM set to their default false value. While I'd like to find out why the archive logs are corrupt (maybe one per day out of 1GB of logs) my more immediate concern is to get rman backups automatically clearing disc space nightly.

Any suggestions as to where to look or what to do would be much appreciated. Received on Thu Jun 26 2003 - 17:56:09 CDT