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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Should I Delete All Archives In One Shoot?

I was just wondering what is the best way to delete the backed up archives using RMAN. I have to choose between DELETE INPUT and DELETE ALL INPUT options.
In my environment, all archives are written on two different locations. If I am going to use the DELETE ALL INPUT option then after the archives from one of the two locations are backed up, all the corresponding archive files are deleted from all available locations. If I am going to use DELETE INPUT option then only the backed up archives are deleted, just from one of the two locations.
Now, I must admit that using the BACKUP ARCHIVELOG ALL command with DELETE ALL INPUT sounds to me a little bit scary as after the successful completion of it I will end up with just one backup set with all backed up archives but no archives redundancy. This backup set becomes the single point of failure if a database recovery must take place and those archives are required.
So, the other approach is to use the DELETE INPUT option only. The below figure shows what's happening in this case:


At T0 moment, there are archives not backed up on both locations. The BACKUP command creates the “Bacup Set1” and deletes the corresponding archives from the LOCATION 1. So, now I have archives on LOCATION 2 and into the backup set as well (redundancy still 2). Suppose that after new archives are generated a new backup is taken. The following figure depicts what will happen in this case:


As it can be noticed, the next BACKUP command creates the “Backup Set2” which contains all archives from the LOCATION2 not deleted by the previous BACKUP command and, in addition, the new generated archive logs from the LOCATION1. These backed up archives are deleted but the redundancy level for them is still two. Much safer, right?

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