Oracle Database Administration: The Essential Refe

Types of Backups

The time to plan for a recovery is before you need to recover data. There are several ways in which your data can be backed up, and each way has its limitations. No two installations will have the same requirements, nor will they necessarily back up data in the same way. In Table 4.1, we list the most common scenarios and show the appropriate backup strategies.

Table 4-1. Common Backup and Recovery Scenarios

If You Need to...	Use This Mechanism
Recover up to the point of failure	Hot backups Cold backups with archivelog mode
Recover individual tables	Exports Tablespace point-in-time recovery
Recover on a different operating system	Exports
Create a point-in-time view of the data for historical records	Exports Cold backups
Recover the database to a point prior to a failure	Hot backups Cold backups with or without archivelog mode Exports
Not have downtime for backups	Hot backups Exports