Thought I would point out a nice little utility i've used on windows 2003 environments. The program is called linkd and it is part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. Linkd is a utility which allows you to create Junction points on a windows server. Junction point is just the term used for directory symbolic links.
Why is this handy? Recently I was asked to restore a windows production database on a test server. As you may know with rman, it is very picky on paths. For example, if you place your backup in a directory called d:\backup\nightly and would like to restore this on another server, then you have to place the backup in the same path.
Unfortunately there wasn't enough free space on D: for me to place the backup. However, there was more than enough on the H: drive. I used the linkd utility to create a symbolic link from D:\backup\nightly to H:\backup\nightly (can be any path) and ran the restore.
On unix symbolic links are common knowledge, not the same for windows... In this case I took over from a couple of dba's who were trying to get this working for over a day (24hrs straight). They opened a case with Oracle Support and before I took it over they were trying to extract the datafiles manually from the backup. Yikes, painful. So hopefully this tool will become more well known.
Related links:
How to create and manipulate NTFS junction points - MS Support Site
Junction V1.05 - MS Technet
Windows 2003 Resource Kit download page
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