I have done this and as you will see, this is alot of manual intervention to 
do this.  Why not run a standby server that you feed archive logs to via a 
remote archiver process?  Then you can take rman hot backup of that machine.  
One question, why is it a requirement to do the backups off server?  If its 
the amount of time you are putting that database in hot backup mode then 
perhaps look into upgrading to oracle9i.  RMAN no longer puts the tablespaces 
into hotbackup mode.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003 11:01:55 -0700, Donaldson, Mark wrote
> So we're looking at changing our backup methods using EMC BCV's. 
>  Today we do full filesystem backups of our Oracle database; we set 
> the DB into hot backup mode, split the data BCV's, roll the logs,
>  then split the archived redo BCV's.  These BCV's are then imported 
> & mounted to our media server & we do simple filesystem full backups 
> to tape.
> 
> The problem is that anticipated growth will make this difficult in 
> the future - we won't be able to move enough data in the necessary timespan.
> Therefore, we're looking at using Oracle RMAN to perform database
> incrementals.  However, I'm still wanting to perform the backup off-
> host so the idea is to use RMAN to backup BCV's mounted on my media server.
> 
> The idea is this, and I'm looking for proponents or detractors to 
> this idea:
> 
> 1. split & import as above to our media server
> 2. Open the database on the media server
> 3. perform the RMAN full and/or incremental as necessary
> 4. shutdown the Oracle instance
> 5. incrementally re-establish.
> 6. rinse & repeat the next night
> 
> The thought is that since the instance on the media server is opened 
> & closed normally and since the BCV should be a blockwise identical 
> copy of the original database, then RMAN doesn't know from run-to-
> run that this is a "new" copy of the DB.  As far as RMAN is 
> concerned, the only DB involved lives exclusively on the media 
> server - it doesn't have to know about the original mounted on the 
> main server.
> 
> Anybody doing this?  Any "gotchas"?
> 
> -M



Thanks,

Joel Keating