Oracle in a Nutshell

Chapter 15. Backup and Recovery

No database is flawless, and no environment is fail-safe. These hard facts collide with the need for absolute reliability and data integrity in an Oracle database. A variety of backup and recovery techniques are available to safeguard an Oracle database and its data from unforeseen problems that could result in the loss of some or all of its data.

This chapter describes the methods commonly used to back up and restore Oracle databases. Before presenting the details of backup and recovery, we’ll summarize the most important backup and recovery terms and concepts and provide a comparison of the available Oracle backup and recovery methods.

There are three basic methods for backing up and restoring Oracle databases:

Export/Import

Oracle provides command-line utilities for exporting data from a database (Export) and importing data into a database (Import). The Export and Import processes produce binary files, which can be transported between machines. Although the Export and Import utilities can be used for backup and recovery operations, they are more frequently used for moving data between different Oracle databases. Chapter 13 describes the details of using these utilities.

User-managed operations

Oracle provides a recommended sequence of operations for backing up and recovering a database using a combination of operating system commands (to back up the database) and SQL*Plus (to restore the database from these backups). If you use this approach, ...