Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

It used to be that certain conditions required the occasional rebuild of the database control
file. If you use RMAN and you do not use a recovery catalog, be very careful of the control file
rebuild. When you issue the command

alter database backup control file to trace;

the script that is generated does not include the information in the control file that identifies
your backups. Without these backup records, you cannot access the backups when they are
needed for recovery. All RMAN information is lost, and you cannot get it back. The only
RMAN information that gets rebuilt when you rebuild the control file is any permanent
configuration parameters you have set with RMAN.
If you back up the control file to a binary file, instead of to trace, then all backup
information is preserved. This command looks like the following:

alter database backup controlfile to ‘/u01/backup/bkup_cfile.ctl’;