Recovery Manager is a powerful tool. It can easily and efficiently perform the day to day "must-do" backup tasks.

As time goes by databases become bigger and bigger. There almost seems to be a competition to break the storage world record, where just one decade ago it was amazing to hear about databases that had broken the Gigabyte limit. Today the limit is at the Terabyte range, and in a few more years it won't be surprising to find databases storing Petabytes or more.

Considering this growth, unless technology radically changes the speed to store and retrieve data, it becomes more and more important to choose the right backup strategy.

Today the term User Managed Backup(UMB) is less frequently used in the oracle communities and the reasons are obvious. UMBs are not reliable, and must backup the complete datafile, even if there are many blank blocks. A UMB cannot detect block corruptions at backup time. This may result to a redundant backup...