Recovery Manager (RMAN)
The Recovery Manager, or RMAN, is a facility provided by Oracle8 to manage hot and cold backups and the associated archive files. RMAN maintains a recovery database (in a different database) of all files necessary to recreate the database to a particular point in time, along with the location of the files. RMAN also allows you to perform incremental hot backups. It is able to look at each data block and determine whether it has changed since the time of the last backup, and write out only those blocks that have changed. This feature can significantly reduce the amount of time and storage required to back up a large database.
The Recovery Manager is a new feature as of Oracle8, and while it helps automate the recovery process, it is not necessary. DBAs have been successfully backing up and restoring databases without RMAN for years. There are also several third-party tools available that provide support for backing up databases.
The Recovery Manager provides support only for cold and hot backups. It does not support exports.
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