Backup Retention on Tape

You can control the length of time that backup copies are retained on tape by specifying a recovery window. A recovery window defines how long the Recovery Appliance maintains tape backups in its catalog for recovery purposes. The recovery window is expressed as an interval, in values of hours, days, weeks, or months. Backups are retained long enough to guarantee that a recovery is possible to any point in time within this interval, counting backward from the current time.

Note:

Recovery windows directly apply only to full or level 0 data file and control file backups.

Recovery Appliance does not purge tape backups. Instead, it informs the media manager which pieces are no longer needed for RMAN retention. With Oracle Secure Backup as the media manager, it does not explicitly delete these files, it updates its catalog. After all files on a given tape are no longer needed, Oracle Secure Backup considers the tape for reuse.

You set the recovery window for a backup by providing a value for it in the protection policy. If this attribute is NULL, then Recovery Appliance never purges the backup from tape.