Backup methods

Hi,

Being quite new to oracle on a DBA front I'm after some advice. How should i be keeping a backup of the database? At the moment i do a nightly export of the database on a per user basis. These are written and zipped into a directory. It cycles 'round so at any one time i have the last 3 days exports. I have only had to recover one user in the past due to data corruption and this export has proved very effective. I do have the instances in archive log mode but to be fair i have no idea how to apply archive logs to a recovered database to bring it back to a point i time. I just rely on the export and then if a problem arises nuke the user, recreate it and import from the export... Is this a very bad thing to be doing? I suspect that although 'it works so why fix it' I'm doing something fundamentally against what is thought to be the correct approach to back and recovery.

any comments appreciated....

Tom

BTW this is not a database linked in anyway to financial transaction if that makes any difference to the approach taken. Received on Fri Mar 29 2002 - 06:20:14 CST