Thanks Marco. I'd be interested in why you would not upgrade the metadata format. It is a change we implemented for scalability, performance and stability so I recommend to do that (including an upgrade to the latest enterprise plug in of course).

The upgrade takes a lot of time. During this time the corresponding job must not run. This needs a lot of planning.

The documented time requirements are several hours for a rather little amount of files. We have much higher amounts of files with higher retentions. So, we didn't do the data upgrade up to now, because we cannot pause our RMAN jobs for a day or more…. We just upgraded the plugin.

Thanks Jochen, that makes sense of course. At least you can upgrade backup by backup, so I hope you get some larger maintenance window for your systems to do that ;-)

We will see…

We have 4 Oracle Systems at the moment, each of them have several databases on them and have 70.000 to 130.000 backup files (log and db backup).

So, this will take some time….

And… we have some long time retention backups on tape. Will they be restorable after upgrade? As far as I understand this at the moment they will be restorable. I hope this will be possible with future versions of the plugins, too.

Interesting article as I saw this come in to my RSS feed yesterday.  Thanks for sharing.