Oracle RMAN

RMAN stands for recovery manager. It is the preferred solution for backup and recovery.

RMAN is a feature. Hence, it does not need a separate installation.

RMAN (as well as SBT) are accessible from both the command line and OEM Cloud Control

RMAN backups might be stored in the fast recovery area.

Components

	Required
Target database	✓
RMAN client (`$ORACLE_HOME/bin/rman`)	✓
fast recovery area
media management software
recovery catalog

Recovery Appliance is the common name for the cloud-scale Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance.

Recovery Appliance reduces data loss and backup overhead.

Recovery Appliance reduces data loss with the following technologies

Real time redo transport: redo changes are continously transferred from the SGA of a (protected) database to a Recovery Appliance)
Replication to remote Recovery Appliances
Automated tape backups made by the centralized Recovery Appliance
End-to-End database block validation

Recovery Appliance scales to many (I mean: many) databases.

Recovery Appliance is integrated with RMAN.

A protection policy defines a recovery window goal.

These protection policies can the individually be assigned to the databases in an organization.

RMAN maintains a repository of historical backup metadata in the control file of every database that it backs up.

If desired, this history can also be stored in a recovery catalog in another database.

Binary compression reduces the size of backups