Treat the control files just as you would any other critical DB file. When you shut your DB down and snapshot it, make a backup copy of the control files also. Control files only change when you do structural changes to your database, and thus must be backed up only then. Of course that is best case, just incorporate control files into your normal backups. As for redo logs they do not nee to be backed up. In fact you really cannot use them for anything other than instance recovery when you have the database crash. If you do a clean shutdown there is no data in these redo's. It gets flushed to disk during the shutdown.

Shure! but I was talking about hot-backups. From what I under- stand the control-file also contains info about the logfiles, so it is important when and how it is copied.

Should it not be a "ALTER SYSTEM SWITCH LOGFILE;" (that also updates the control file) and then a "ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO '/SomeDirectory/SomeFileName.bkp' REUSE;" before the snapshot is taken??

Also to minimize the time that the database is in backup mode I would move all the "rsh -l root filer4 snap ..." commands in dohotbackup.sh to a line before the dobegin.sql script is run.

/Gynt

______________________________________________ FREE Personalized Email at Mail.com Sign up at http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup