Okay, after a meeting with the boss, I must give her more credit than I did in the previoius posts. Confusion was on my part as to her understanding of the export issue. Boss was fully understanding the fact that the exports were only an Instant-in-time recovery and that all info would be lost between exports. She viewed these exports as a worst-case disaster recovery, assuming no access to the production machine.

Did I mention we have had one tornado swipe the building in last couple years?

So, after discussion about the role of the archive logs, making these logs go to other destinations, what is really needed to recover, etc, I think we have made drastic improvements.

My intent now will be to change the exports to either once every 12 or once a day, opposite the hot backups. This export will be done in direct mode to reduce the load.

I will also be redirecting my archive logs to a secondary location. Thus, ensuring there recovery.

Question? can the online logs be placed accros machines?

I have never done a restore from hotbackup. How does that work? I am trying to find the docs on it now so I can read up on it.

I am going to use my cold backup from 2 days ago and copy the database to a new machine. I will then copy over the archive logs, and use the backup controlfile made last night to see if I can get the databae to recover to the point of the scn's in the control file. Is that workable? Plausbile?