Blockrecover in standard edition? Nope, but close enough

So you have a backup, you say? And when did you test it last time? The wise man once said: „The condition of any backup is unknown until a restore is attempted.”. This is the story of Schrödinger’s Backup that happened at one of our customers Apparently they had a storage crash six months before, which caused some blocks to get corrupted and from that time no one has noticed that RMAN is not producing any backups.But the system was working fine so no one was complaining at the business level… until the Halloween 2022. It has occurred that twice a year they do some complex reporting and while doing it, they noticed corrupted blocks in some tablespaces. Blockrecover would be a blessing but it is possible only in Enterprise Edition, so they tried to restore and recover affected database files from 6 months before, and it was not a surprise that the process of applying that amount of archivelogs lasted a very, very long time…