When you archive your redo log, you write redo log files to another location before they are overwritten. This location is called the archived redo log. These copies of redo log files extend the amount of redo data that can be saved and used for recovery. Archiving can be either enabled or disabled for the database, but Oracle recommends that you enable archiving.
About Archived Redo Log Files for an Oracle RAC Database
When you use Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to create your Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) database, each instance is configured with at least two redo log files that are stored in the shared storage area. If you have a two-node Oracle RAC database, then at least four redo logs are created for the database, two for each instance.
If you use a cluster file system to store the archived redo log files for your Oracle RAC database, then the redo log files are shared file system files. If you use Oracle ASM to store the archived redo log files for your Oracle RAC database, then each instance automatically has access to all the archived redo log files generated by the database. If you use shared storage or raw devices to store the archived redo log files on each node, then you must configure the operating system to grant access to those directories for each instance of the cluster database that needs access to them.
To backup the archived redo logs from a single node, that node must have access to the archived log files of the other instances. The archived redo log naming scheme that you use is important because when a node writes to a log with a specific filename on its file system, the file must be readable by any node that must access this archived redo log. For example, if node1 archives a log to /oracle/arc_dest/log_1_100_23452345.arc, then node2 can back up this archived redo log only if it can read/oracle/arc_dest/log_1_100_23452345.arc on its own file system.
About Parallelism and Backups Across Multiple RMAN Channels
Recovery Manager (RMAN) depends on server sessions, processes that run on the database server, to perform backup and recovery tasks. Each server session in turn corresponds to an RMAN channel, representing one stream of data to or from a backup device. RMAN supports parallelism, which is the use of multiple channels and server sessions to perform the work of a single backup job or file restoration task.
Because the control file, SPFILE, and data files are accessible by any instance, the backup operation of the