RMAN's COPY command

Following some thread on forums, I had logged a documentation query against the 11gR2 RMAN documentation on 31-Jan.

My question to Oracle's 11gR2 documentation team had been

"Why is the COPY command not documented in the Reference ?" (referring to the 11gR2 Backup and Recovery Reference).

I have today received a response from the documentation team :

Dear RMAN Reader,

Thank you for your feedback and question.

The RMAN COPY command was deprecated in Oracle Database 10gR1. This change is highlighted in "Deprecated RMAN Syntax" section of the documentation. The command that replaces it is BACKUP AS COPY. Previously, when you created a backup set with the COPY command you then had to use RMAN to extract individual datafiles from that backup set. The BACKUP AS COPY command creates image copies and this eliminates the need to extract them from a backup set. The BACKUP AS COPY command allows you to copy a database, tablespaces, datafiles, archived redo logs, and control files.


For example:

RMAN> BACKUP AS COPY DATAFILE 4 FORMAT '+TEST';


I hope this answers your question.

Regards,
Oracle Documentation Team

Although I can't now recall which forums thread was it that piqued my curiousity about this issue with the documentation, I'd thought I should now post this response here.

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