Hello everyone, first I'll go ahead and apologize for such a long post.

I'd like to ask everyone; what works best for those of you backing up multiple 
Oracle db's from a single host. I have several Oracle 10g servers I backup. 
Each has anywhere from 1 to 20 db instances. I use a single policy and a common 
path & script name to backup the Oracle servers. This for me keeps the number 
of policies I have to manage down to a minimum. 

Our dba's have asked for one policy to be setup per DB. The reasoning behind 
this is that they want the flexibility to restart a failed backup without the 
restart initiating a backup of all DB's on servers. I told them that what they 
should be doing on failed DB backups is from the "activity monitor", right 
click on the failed Job ID and select restart. 

Here is where my lack of "in depth knowledge" of how NBU works with the Oracle 
RMAN API when a single stream fails. 

They asked, how does NBU know to just restart the backup for the DB that 
failed? The best "high level" reply I could come up with was that NBU tracks 
which DB piece it's backing up in a log and when a restart is initiated, it's 
able to request a backup of just the DB which that piece was associated with 
via calls to the Oracle RMAN API. 

In other words, restarting a single failed Jod ID from "activity monitor" for a 
backup stream associated with an Oracle backup does not mean that NBU looks at 
the policy and executes the backup script specified in the backup selection for 
all servers or just one server which is a member of that policy.

Am I wrong? 
How does a restart work with Oracle? 
How do you backup Oracle servers which host multiple instances?
What are the advantages and disadvantages if any with one policy per instance?

Having a policy for each to me sounds like a nightmare in more than one way but 
I'd REALLY appreciate anyone's input here.

Thanks in advance to everyone that replies!

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