RMAN. To be or not to be about Oracle Backup

I have found a lot of sites still using the user-managed backup method. We're in the RMAN century and I believe it's necessary migrate to RMAN for Oracle Backup&Recovery.

RMAN has a lot of useful functions that free the DBA of awful rutinary tasks. RMAN takes care of our backups and with a simple command you can backup your database without operating system scripts. RMAN provides block level corruption detection during backup and restore, optimize performance and space consumption with backup set compression. With 10g we have the new feature Flash Recovery Area, disk destination space for RMAN backup's that Oracle manage and it's not necessary to be worried about managing free space of our destination backup area. We have to dimension the Flash Recovery Area with the space needed for our backup policy retention.

There is a lot of information about RMAN but all that you must know is in "Backup and Recovery Advanced User’s Guide" that you can download of OTN