hi Pav,
the nature of our business dictates that we are only likely to need to recover using the last good backup etc.
We are never going to need to go back serveral weeks etc.
I guess my question is around the usefulness of the archive logs .. if we had a full backup through rman say last night, and we needed to recover today, then would we need any archive log files that were older than yesterday? i.e. when the backup is taken is the content of the archive log files up to date and the database contains everything up to date in its datafiles, and anything older is redundant, or would we need the older ones in the event of having to go back further in time (which as I said is pretty much never)?
i.e. if we for example needed to do a point in time recovery to last week, then if we had deleted the archive log files would we not be able to do it, or would the database have record of the data at that point in time anyway, so we would not need them?

Also, rman deletes the log files in realtion to the database once it has backed up - but it is the physical files that are remaining, are they any use to us?