Here are 2 good documents for reference:
Merged Incremental Backup Strategies (Doc ID 745798.1)
Oracle Backup and Recovery for a VLDB
You can find my playing around here
I did find the results of switch database to copy awkward with the data file name.
LAX:(SYS@db01)> show parameter db_create NAME TYPE VALUE ------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------ db_create_file_dest string /oracle/oradata db_create_online_log_dest_1 string /oracle/oradata db_create_online_log_dest_2 string /oracle/oradata db_create_online_log_dest_3 string db_create_online_log_dest_4 string db_create_online_log_dest_5 string LAX:(SYS@db01)> alter system set db_create_file_dest='/oracle/datafilecopy'; System altered. LAX:(SYS@db01)> create tablespace testing datafile size 16m; Tablespace created. LAX:(SYS@db01)> select name from v$datafile; NAME -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /oracle/datafilecopy/data_D-DB01_I-1452485914_TS-SYSTEM_FNO-1_pbonf3p6.dbf /oracle/datafilecopy/data_D-DB01_I-1452485914_TS-SYSAUX_FNO-2_pconf3pm.dbf /oracle/datafilecopy/data_D-DB01_I-1452485914_TS-UNDOTBS_FNO-3_p9onf3nk.dbf /oracle/datafilecopy/data_D-DB01_I-1452485914_TS-USER_DATA_FNO-4_paonf3on.dbf /oracle/datafilecopy/LAX_DB01/datafile/o1_mf_testing_96v0nk2p_.dbf LAX:(SYS@db01)>
Is this something that can be lived with?
