You should have figured out by now that RMAN is a highly advanced tool in your arsenal of weapons against things that may attack the database. It even helps protect the database against the DBA, the most powerful being that it is sworn to protect but is also the greatest threat.
One of the most important things you should take away from this chapter is to maintain a constant vigilant eye on the database alert log. Errors may occur within SQL*Plus or other clients that actually mask a much larger issue such as corruption.
In order to provide the best possible service to your customers while keeping outages to a minimum, RMAN is one of the best tools for database backups and recovery. Remember the following list because these are important to backup and recovery as part of the MAA in addition to using RMAN:
Running in archivelog mode—gives the ability to recover more transactions.
Multiple copies of the controlfile—redundancy on different mount points.
Multiple copies of online redo logs...