HOTBACKUP Help!

Can anyone point me to some online resources or recommend any books that cover everything a dummy need to know about hot backups? I have the Oracle Press Backup and Recovery Handbook and it devotes one whole paragraph to hotbackups.

I am a Unix veteran turned DBA maintaining some very busy databases. I frequently have to build test databases using the hotbackups from production databases and I am having frequent problems. (ie: recovery not working, control file problems, etc..)

After I have placed all tablespaces/datafiles into backup mode and copied them, I back up the control file as follows:

alter database backup controlfile to /my/backup/dest/control.08272002

When I go and build a database from this hotbackup, I merely rename and use the file created above ($CONTROL_FILE)
ie:

cp control08272002 control01.ctl
cp control08272002 control02.ctl
cp control08272002 control03.ctl

Am I not doing this correctly?

Thanks,
CC

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