Oracle Backup Types

Oracle Backup Types
1. Physical 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.
   For example:
   (1.) shutdown the database, use os copy command backup all the control files, datafiles, online redo log files.
   (2.) use RMAN to make image copies of an tablespace when a database is running.
   (3.) use RMAN to make a full backup of the database.
   (4.) ...
2. 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.
   For instance:
   (1.) use exp or expdp utilities to export all objects of a database, or all objects of a schema(or schemas).