How many control files on one volume?

[efrijters]

Yes, offcourse you are right. Disk corruptions are rare, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

But... if I have only two control files, stored at separate places and backup the control files regularly to a trace file, than I would have better performance because of the lower number of control files and still have good backups of them. In case of problems, you can restore the control file out of the trace file.

I had this procedure in mind (from metalink):

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE proc_control_to_trace AS   
2   cursor1 INTEGER;   
3  BEGIN   
4   cursor1 := dbms_sql.open_cursor;   
5   dbms_sql.parse(cursor1, 'ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO TRACE',
       dbms_sql.native);   
6   dbms_sql.close_cursor(cursor1);   
7  END;