Benefits of the server-managed backup and recovery feature are robust, as the following list illustrates:
- Improves database administrator productivity by handling the database backup and recovery operations
- Simplifies the backup and recovery process
- Allows backing up of the entire database, or a subset of the database, in one operation
- Minimizes the possibility of operator error and detects database corruption
- Minimizes disk space needed for backup creation by supporting incremental backups
- Minimizes the time needed to backup and restore operations by automatically performing automatic backups and restores
- Reduces the performance impact of backups on the online system by limiting the number of redo entries generated
- Allows backups whether the database is open or closed
- Provides greater flexibility in recovery operations by allowing restore and recovery of a datafile using a mixture ofincremental backups and application of archived redo logs
- Optionally, can perform full block checking when performing a backup and can add checksums to a backup
- Supports the Oracle Parallel Server
- Supports sequential input/output (I/O) devices for output during backup and for input during restore operations; also supports tape backups in conjunction with vendor-provided tape management systems
- Can back up disk archived logs to tape
- Can restore tape-archived logs back to disk