Tuning and Monitoring RMAN and the Automatic Diagnostic Workflow - OCP: Oracle Database 12c Administrator Certified Professional - page 241

Example of the REPORT NEED BACKUP Command
If you wanted to know which data files need to be backed up in your database based on the
retention criteria, you could use the REPORT NEED BACKUP command:
RMAN> report need backup;
RMAN retention policy will be applied to the command
RMAN retention policy is set to redundancy 1
Report of files with less than 1 redundant backups
File #bkps Name
---- ----- ------------------------------------------
5 0 C:\ORACLE\ORADATA\ORCL\MY_DATA_01.DBF
In this example you see that data file 5 is in need of backup with respect to the retention
policy. You also see that it has 0 backups (in the #bkps column). In this case, this is a new
data file that has never been backed up.
You can use various options with the REPORT NEED BACKUP command to customize the
report. For example, you could say that you want to see a report of all files that have not been
backed up in the last three days. The report would look like this:
RMAN> report need backup days 3;
Report of files whose recovery needs more than 3 days of archived logs
File Days Name
---- ----- -----------------------------------------------------
1 6 C:\ORACLE\ORADATA\ORCL\SYSTEM01.DBF
2 6 C:\ORACLE\ORADATA\ORCL\SYSAUX01.DBF
3 6 C:\ORACLE\ORADATA\ORCL\UNDOTBS01.DBF
4 6 C:\ORACLE\ORADATA\ORCL\USERS01.DBF
There are other reporting options besides days :
Incremental Maximum number of incrementals to apply.
Recovery window of Indicates the recovery-window criteria to apply. This can be handy
when trying to determine the impacts of changing the recovery-window retention policy.
Redundancy Indicates the level of backup redundancy for data files. This can be handy
when trying to determine the impacts of changing the redundancy retention policy.
Example of the REPORT OBSOLETE Command
The REPORT OBSOLETE command is used to list backup sets that are marked as obsolete in
the control file or the recovery catalog. Depending on your configuration, you might look
at the REPORT OBSOLETE command output and ensure that the backups listed in that com-
mand are supposed to be deleted. If so, you could remove them with the DELETE OBSOLETE
command (discussed later in this chapter).
In this example, you can see that several backup set pieces are obsolete and no longer
needed. If these were present in a Fast Recovery Area (FRA), then Oracle would automatically