RMAN Archivelog backups

I changed my stored rman backup scripts today. (Note: I'm still in 9i)

Until now, the nightly incremental backups included a backup statement along the lines of
"backup incrementel level cumulative plus archivelog;"
(I also do a crosscheck, validate, and deletion of backups > 7 days old, but that's beside the point...)

I have a maximum redundancy level set for the archive logs, so rman won't try to back up an archivelog if it already has the correct number of copies.

All well and good, until last Wednesay when a query ran amok on the production server. I was on vacation, and when I called to check in with my backup he reported an update query had been running for hours, the archive logs were switching 3x per minute, and he was generally not enjoyingn life. ;-)

We got the query killed, but that night the incremental backup attempted to make a copy of all those logs -- naturally we ran out of space in that drive and the backup failed.

My fault, I should have thought to warn him to change the backup script to a level zero and only back up archive logs since after the runaway was killed. So, the next morning we did exactly that and successfully backed up the system. (Not an ideal situation, but we still had the original archive logs and don't have any SLA requiring us to go back further than midnight. I choose to keep more as a protection, based on painful experience in prior jobs.)

Next night, rman (rightfully) recognizes there's archive logs out there it hasn't backed up and tries again -- did I mention I was on vacation last week and my brain wasn't firing at 100%? Full drive again, etc.

Sigh.

So the third try's the charm -- I connected in and adjusted the routine scripts to not try backing up any archive logs more than 2 days old. The theory is if we haven't backed them up within the last two days, we were having "issues" and chose purposely to ignore them.

Revised script looks more like this:

backup incremental level cumulative database filesperset 4;
backup archivelog from time 'sysdate - 2';
(followed by the crosscheck, validate and delete steps)

Now ideally, I'd have much more disk space available for backups -- and I've requested them from our sysadmins -- but in the meantime this hack does the job....

btw, wouldn't it be nice to be able to edit a stored rman script instead of deleting and replacing? It's a minor whine since I have a .sql that outputs all stored scripts to text file for archival purposes -- but it'd be nice.