Q&As: Incremental Backup

(Q) What are the characteristics of Incremental Backups?

• Store only blocks changed since a previous incremental (Level 0 or Level 1) backup
• Provide more compact backups and faster recovery
• Less redo logs are applied during recovery
• If you enable block change tracking, then full table scans on input files will not be performed during recovery
• You can take a Level 0 or Level 1 Incremental Backup

$ rman
RMAN> CONNECT TARGET /
RMAN> BACKUP
       INCREMENTAL LEVEL 1 CUMULATIVE
       SKIP INACCESSIBLE
       DATABASE;

The example above:

• Backs up all blocks changed since the most recent LEVEL 0 incremental backup.
• If no LEVEL 0 backup exists, RMAN makes a LEVEL 0 automatically.
• Inaccessible files are skipped