Retention Policy in RMAN

When you are taking backups regularly to a specified disk then after some period of time the backup disk will get full and you will need to delete old backups to make space for new backups. Usually you delete the old backups manually by following a particular rule like, deleting all the backups taken before 1 month or keep 2 backup copies of datafiles and delete older copies. Manually identifying and deleting old backup files is cumbersome. To help you out, Oracle RMAN has a feature called RETENTION POLICY. By configuring Retention Policy in RMAN, you can easily delete old backups by just giving one command. Let’s see how to configure Retention Policy and how to delete old backups Configuring Retention Policy You can configure retention policy to either number of days or number of copies. By default the RETENTION POLICY is set to redundancy 1. Configuring Retention Policy to number of copies

RMAN> configure retention policy to redundancy 2;

In the above command we are asking RMAN to keep 2 backup copies of each file. Backup copies which are older than 2 copies can be marked as obsolete and hence can be deleted.