What is Backup and Recovery?

In general, backup and recovery refers to the various strategies and procedures involved in protecting your database
against data loss and reconstructing the database after any kind of data loss.

Physical Backups and Logical Backups

A backup is a copy of data from your database that can be used to reconstruct that data. Backups can be divided into
physical backups and logical backups.
Physical backups are backups of the physical files used in storing and recovering your database, such as datafiles,
control files, and archived redo logs. Ultimately, every physical backup is a copy of files storing database information
to some other location, whether on disk or some offline storage such as tape.
Logical backups contain logical data (for example, tables or stored procedures) exported from a database with an
Oracle export utility and stored in a binary file, for later re-importing into a database using the corresponding Oracle
import utility.Physical backups are the foundation of any sound backup and recovery strategy. Logical backups are a
useful supplement to physical backups in many circumstances but are not sufficient protection against data loss without
physical backups.
Unless otherwise specified, the term "backup" as used in the backup and recovery documentation refers to physical
backups, and to back up part or all of your database is to take some kind of physcial backup. The focus in the backup
and recovery documentation set will be almost exclusively on physical backups.

Oracle Backup and Recovery Solutions: RMAN and User-Managed Backup

For performing backup and recovery based on physical backups, you have two solutions available:

• Recovery Manager, a tool (with command-line client and Enterprise Manager GUI interfaces) that integrates
with sessions running on the Oracle server to perform a range of backup and recovery activities, as well as
maintaining a repository of historical data about your backups
• The traditional user-managed backup and recovery, where you directly manage the files that make up your
database with a mixture of host operating system commands and SQL*Plus backup and recovery-related
capabilities

Both methods are supported by Oracle Corporation and are fully documented. Recovery Manager is, however, the
preferred solution for database backup and recovery. It can perform the same types of backup and recovery available
through user-managed methods more easily, provides a common interface for backup tasks across different host
operating systems, and offers a number of backup techniques not available through user-managed methods.
Most of the backup and recovery documentation set will focus on RMAN-based backup and recovery. User-managed
backup and recovery techniques are covered in the later chapters of Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Advanced
User's Guide.
Whether you use RMAN or user-managed methods, you can supplement your physical backups with logical backups of
schema objects made using data export utilities. Data thus saved can later be imported to re-create this data after restore
and recovery. However, logical backups are for the most part beyond the scope of the backup and recovery
documentation.