Confused about RMAN Functioning

Greetings,

I find myself puzzled about how RMAN is functioning. I'm running 10gR2 on RHEL3. My backup script does the following (lots of stuff which I will leave out but is not relevant). The relevant piece is this...

sqlplus -s / << EOF
  ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO '<file_spec>';   quit
EOF $RMAN target / nocatalog <<EOF
RUN {
  ALLOCATE CHANNEL disk1 DEVICE TYPE DISK;   BACKUP INCREMENTAL LEVEL=${_BK_LEVEL} FORMAT '<file_spec>' FILESPERSET=64 AS COMPRESSED BACKUPSET DATABASE;   SQL 'ALTER SYSTEM ARCHIVE LOG CURRENT';   BACKUP FORMAT '<file_spec>' ARCHIVELOG ALL DELETE INPUT;   BACKUP FORMAT '<file_spec>' CURRENT CONTROLFILE;   RELEASE CHANNEL disk1;
}
EOF Everything is fine, I have tested restores and all works as expected. My confusion is regarding the difference between the rman commands...

RMAN> list copy of controlfile;
RMAN> list backup of controlfile;

The copy lists the file created by the...

ALTER DATABASE BACKUP CONTROLFILE TO '<file_spec>';

command and list backup of controlfile displays the file created by the...

BACKUP FORMAT '<file_spec>' CURRENT CONTROLFILE;

command. I don't understand the difference between the copy and the backup and how RMAN is tracking and using these two pieces. If anyone can explain I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208

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