Testing Rman Backup

Question

Im testing my Rman backup.
We do our backup with the following command:
BACKUP AS COPY DATABASE TAG = 'Full Copy 2007/03/11 19:15:02';
On another machine, im testing the recovery like the following:
rman TARGET / NOCATALOG
startup nomount;
SET DBID my_bd_id;
RESTORE CONTROLFILE FROM '/mnt/jukprod_rman/rman_backup/20070311/c-3976015942-20070311-00';
alter database mount;
RESTORE DATABASE UNTIL TIME "TO_DATE('20070311 21:35:00','YYYYMMDD HH24:MI:SS')" PREVIEW;
Problem:
Rman wants 2 months of archive logs!!
no backup of log thread 1 seq 80017 lowscn 10641963078 found to restore
To
no backup of log thread 1 seq 85592 lowscn 13248466314 found to restore
That is 5575 archive logs that Rman needs. 100 Megs in size.
so Rman needs 557 gig of archive!
Whats wrong here?
How come Rman needs all those archive?
Why would rman need archive older that the backup since we did a backup as copy?
We want full backup with not need older archive logs.

Answer 1

Hi,
I don't think that BACKUP AS COPY is a real backup for future RESTORE command. May be you could use this statement for next commands:
BACKUP DATAFILECOPY
SWITCH DATAFILE TO
For good backup strategy you have to use statement like
BACKUP DATABASE INCREMENTAL LEVEL=0 PLUS ARCHIVELOG DELETE INPUT;
or simply
BACKUP DATABASE.
Than you have many old backups and you would like to restore in point of past
you have to use SET command.
If you use COPY of datafiles you have to do next:
restore spfile;
startup nomount
run{
set newname for_all_datafile_to_copy;
RESTORE CONTROLFILE FROM '/mnt/jukprod_rman/rman_backup/20070311/c-3976015942-20070311-00';
alter database mount;
switch all;
recover database;
open resetlogs;
Sergey