Making Copies of Copies with Oracle RMAN

I recently had need to make a copy of an image copy in Oracle rman. Since it wasn't immediately obvious to me, I thought it was worth sharing once I had it sorted out. I was familiar with making a backup of a backup, but had never thought about making a copy of a copy.

First you need to create an image copy of your database or tablespace. For the sake of example, I'll make a copy of the FOO tablespace. The key is to assign a tag to it that you can use for later reference. I'll use the tag "DTSCOPYTEST":

So I have my image copy in the DG1 tablespace. Now say we want to make copy of that for some testing purpose and put it in a different diskgroup. For that, we need the "BACKUP AS COPY COPY" command, and we'll want to specify the copy we just took by using the tag that was used:

    format '+DG2';

As you'd guess, RMAN makes a copy of the first copy, writing it to the specified format location.

As always, hope this helps!