In oracle we have A LOT of backups :) So let's start. First thing first, since Oracle is RDBMS we have couple standard backups types:

• Physical - Physical Copy of the data (RMAN, datafile copy, snapshot, etc)
• Logical - Logical represantion of data (expdp, csv, etc)

For Physical backups, we have also types of the data inside of the backups:

Physical:

• Full
• Incremental (Cummulative, Differential)

Physical backups, especially RMAN backups, provide us with a lot of different options like:

• Compression
• Encryption
• Parallelism

These options are somhow available also with logical backup using expdp, however not to their full extend.

Let's start with the backup process, as before, we have different processes for physical and logical backup.

Physical backup in Oracle, mostly means RMAN backup. RMAN is the ONLY Oracle utility for Physical backup. RMAN is a client utility, so it needs to connect to the Oracle Instance in order to perform a backup.

Recovery process can be summarized in the following matrix: