Rman not replacing logs with same name on networked drive

Question

Historically, rman saved logs by replacing files of the same name so that the most recent set was always there, and logs from backup of older than the most recent set simply went away.

Rman is successfully saving the log files to the mapped network drive location, but it only saves the first go round of the assorted backup type running through the Windows Scheduler.

If I move the first set of log files to an archive directory, rman stores up another full set. Using full backups, Incremental Level 0 and Incremental level 1 backups.

Previously, when rman was saving to a location on the server of the target database, it would always simply replace one set of backup logs with a newer version of the same type, since they (of the same type) would all have the same name.

Can one place the date (_d%) or some other data into the name so that the names will never be duplicated? That is not what I really want, but it would be far better than not getting logs, or having to remember to archive logs each rotaion to get new logs saved.

When I have tried placing name switches in rman logs, I found it just did not save the logs. so I must not have been doing it right, if it is possible. If someone could help me learn how to order rman log names, i would appreciate it.

None of this has any effect on the actual backups, they are working great.

Thank you....

Answer 1

If logging with RMAN, you'd have to set the filename yourself - there's no wildcard. But there is an APPEND option.

spool log to 'my_log_file' append

Similarly, invoking RMAN with the APPEND option causes it to append to any log file specified.

Our backup scripts do the log maintenance at the OS level:

export LOGPREFIX=$ORACLE_ADMIN/$ORACLE_SID/rman/log/my_backup_script
export MYLOG=${LOGPREFIX}.$$   # add the pid to the log file name
rman log=${MYLOG} append <<EOF
... various RMAN commands
EOF

#Perform error checking and notification
fgrep -i RMAN- ${MYLOG}
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then # we had a failure - email me
   mail -s "$0 : failure for `date +%m/%d/%y`" me@myself_and_i.com < ${MYLOG}
fi
# add the incremental log to the permanent log
cat ${MYLOG} >> ${LOGPREFIX}.log
# clean up the incremental log
/bin/rm -f ${MYLOG}