RMAN Backups and Reporting - Oracle RMAN for Absolute Beginners - page 125

This command ensures that the control file is automatically backed up when a BACKUP or COPY command is
issued. I usually enable the autobackup of the control file feature and then never have to worry about explicitly issuing
a separate command to back up the control file. When in this mode the control file is always created in its own backup
set and backup piece after the data file backup pieces have been created.
If you need to back up the control file manually, you can do so like this:

RMAN> backup current controlfile;

The location of the backup is either a default OS location, the FRA (if using), or a manually configured location.
As shown in Chapter 4, I prefer to set the location of the control file backup piece to the same location as that of the
data file backups:

RMAN> configure controlfile autobackup format for device type disk to
'/u01/O12C/rman/rman_ctl_%F.bk';

Backing up the spfile
If you have enabled the autobackup of the control file feature, the spfile will be backed up automatically (along with
the control file) anytime a BACKUP or COPY command is issued. If you need to back up the spfile manually, use the
following command:

RMAN> backup spfile;

The location of the file that contains the backup of the spfile is dependent on what you have configured for the
autobackup of the control file (see the previous section for an example). By default, if you don't use an FRA, and you
haven't explicitly configured a location via a channel, then for Linux/Unix servers, the backup goes to the
ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory.

■ Note rMaN can only back up the spfile if the instance was started using a spfile .

Backing Up Archive Redo Logs
I don't usually back up the archive redo logs separately from the database backups. As mentioned earlier, I normally
back up the database files and the archive redo log files by using the following command:

RMAN> backup incremental level=0 database plus archivelog;

However, you will occasionally find yourself in a situation in which you need to take a special, one-off backup of
the archive redo logs. You can issue the following command to back up the archive redo logs files:

RMAN> backup archivelog all;

If you have a mount point that is nearly full, and you determine that you want to back up the archive redo logs
(so that they exist in a backup file), but then you want to immediately delete the files (that were just backed up) from
disk, you can use the following syntax to back up the archive redo logs and then have RMAN delete them from the
storage media:

RMAN> backup archivelog all delete input;