Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference

Validating backups

One nice feature of RMAN is the ability to report on the status of backups. The simplest way to view backup information is via the list backup command.

RMAN> list backup;

The output of list backup displays information such as the name, level, completion time, and status of each backup. Additionally, RMAN also has a nice way to verify whether the backup files are restorable. You accomplish this by issuing the restore database validate command. This command doesn’t actually restore any datafiles, it just validates that the contents of the backup sets can be restored if necessary. The following example works with both Oracle8i and Oracle9i:

RMAN> run {
2> allocate channel d1 type disk;
3> restore database validate;
4> }