Rebuild and incremental backup images

You can rebuild a database using incremental images.

By default, the restore utility tries to use automatic incremental restore for all incremental images. This means that if you do not use the INCREMENTAL option of the RESTORE DATABASE command, but the target image is an incremental backup image, the restore utility will issue the rebuild operation using automatic incremental restore. If the target image is not an incremental image, but another required image is an incremental image then the restore utility will make sure those incremental images are restored using automatic incremental restore. The restore utility will behave in the same way whether you specify the INCREMENTAL option with the AUTOMATIC option or not.

If you specify the INCREMENTAL option but not the AUTOMATIC option, you will need to perform the entire rebuild process manually. The restore utility will just restore the initial metadata from the target image, as it would in a regular manual incremental restore. You will then need to complete the restore of the target image using the required incremental restore chain. Then you will need to restore the remaining images to rebuild the database.

It is recommended that you use automatic incremental restore to rebuild your database. Only in the event of a restore failure, should you attempt to rebuild a database using manual methods.