Need advice on backup management

I am the sole (beginning) DBA and developer for Oracle 8.0.4 on Solaris 2.6 where I work. It is a new database and we have not setup any procedures for backing up the database. I have the DBA Handbook by oracle press but would like to get some 'real world' advice from those of you who actually do the backups/admin of Oracle databases. Any advice on doing backups would be appreciated. Specifically: Whether or not to use Racovery/Backup manager. OS specifics like tar files etc..

I tried to stay OFA compliant when installing Oracle by splitting the control and redo files acroos three mount points (as the installer requested). I also manually move several datafiles across different drives to improve performace (serperating index and data tablesapce datafiles etc...) and updated the locations with 'alter database'. I just wanted you to have a feel with how are db is spread out.

Thank you for any advice,
Ryan
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