Originally posted by sandycrab

1. Suppose my DB crashes on Thursday, so how many backup sets do I need to copy on this new server…

depends on whether your level 1 backups are cumulative or not. If they are cumulative, you will need Saturday's level 0 and Wednesday's level 1 (assuming no new datafiles were added). If it is not a cumulative, you will need Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday's backups.


2. Do I need copy this backup set to a specific directory in the new machine because as I issue the command ‘Recover Database’, oracle will find the backup from where?
If you backed up to disk, the easiest way to do it is to put your backupset in a directory that is named the same as on your prod server. In Unix this is easy because we have soft links, but Windoz might be a little more difficult.