Configuring Backup Device Settings

For disk-based backups, you can configure the default format for backups, the location on disk where backups are stored, whether backup tasks run in parallel, and whether backups are compressed.

For tape backups, you can configure settings such as the number of tape drives and whether backups are compressed. On most platforms, you must integrate a media manager with the Oracle database to use sequential media for storage.

You can use Oracle Secure Backup, which supports both database and file system backups to tape, as your media manager. Oracle Secure Backup provides the same services for Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) as other third-party SBT interfaces. This section assumes that you make only disk backups.

Use the RMAN CONFIGURE command to configure backup device settings such as the default backup type, disk location to which database files are backed up, and parallelism. Use the RMAN SHOW ALL command to view the currently configured settings.

To configure backup device settings:

Connect RMAN to the target database as described in "Connecting to the Target Database Using RMAN."
Specify that the default device used to store backups is disk. The following command directs RMAN to store backups to disk.
```
CONFIGURE DEFAULT DEVICE TYPE TO DISK;
```
Specify that the backups must be stored on disk in the form of backup sets. Also set the parallelism to 1.
```
CONFIGURE DEVICE TYPE DISK BACKUP TYPE TO BACKUPSET PARALLELISM 1;
```
Backups on disk can be stored in the form of backup sets or image copies. Image copies are exact copies of database files. They are not stored in an RMAN-specific format and can be used as-is to perform recovery. Backup sets use an RMAN-specific format. With backup sets, RMAN uses unused block compression to save space by backing up only the blocks that contain data. RMAN can also encrypt backups and create incremental backups.

Note:

For more information about image copies and backup sets, see Oracle Database Backup and Recovery User's Guide