Oracle Database 11g—Underground Advice for Database Administrators

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 ...