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Was incremental backup differential or cumulative?

Is there a way to tell whether an incremental backup was done in a differential or cumulative manner in RMAN?

Brian Peasland

Published: 18 Jul 2007

Hi, I've been wondering if there is a way to tell whether an incremental backup was done in a differential or cumulative manner? RMAN views seem to only indicate it as an incremental level 1 backup.

The RC_BACKUP_SET view can be used to determine this information. The BACKUP_TYPE column indicates if the backup is a full or incremental level 0 if this column contains 'D.' If the column contains 'I,' the backup set is for an incremental backup. The INCREMENTAL_LEVEL column shows the incremental level (obviously). If you are not seeing any rows in this view where BACKUP_TYPE='I' and INCREMENTAL_LEVEL='0' then look for BACKUP_TYPE='D.'

Chapter 3 of the RMAN documentation describes all of the Recovery Catalog views.

Dig Deeper on Oracle database backup and recovery

Oracle RMAN tutorial: Get started with database backup Oracle Recovery Manager offers advantages over user-managed database backups. It's important to know the right commands to begin several different kinds of backups.

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How to perform an incremental level 0 backup Our Database Backup and Recovery expert explains how to perform an incremental level 0 backup in RMAN.

How to recover if incremental backup fails If somehow only Tuesday's backup did not run or failed, then can I use the whole week's backup to restore and recover the database? In this situation what would be the backup strategy?

How to change backup strategy to decrease downtime I am taking cold backups of my database which is in noarchive mode on a daily basis; now I am planning to change my backup strategy to decrease the downtime.

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