>Question is :
>when i go about restore, how would i know which backup is being restored..
the
>active backup?? what would i need to do to restore any inactive backup??

Hello

As far as I know "rman" always uses the latest available backupsets, and
there is no official and supported way to restore previous versions of a
database.

But, as usually, there is a trick that makes is possibile, I use it quite
frequently in order to test & verify my oracle-tdp backups.

The trick is based on the fact that if the "rman" finds that the latest
backupsets are marked "unavailable" it will search its database backwards
until available backupsets are found and those backupsets will be used for
restore operations.

To summarize:

a) change status of  the rman backupsets that You do NOT want to be used to
unavailable (change backupset xxx unavailable)
b) restore database
c) change status of the rman backupsets that were modified in step "a" back
to available (change backupset xxx available)

To make it easier I created a shell/rman script. (It's strongly hard-coded
to my environment, but with a little effort can be adjusted to be useful in
other environments).

Please let me know whether You are interested, if yes I can send that script
and try to assist in customizing it.

kind regards

Pawel W.
pwozniczka@no_spam_kghm.pl