I've been told by a Value-Added-Resaler of Oracle that if i want to backup
an oracle 7 db, i should first do a full export, and then backup up the
exported file.
They said that a simple backup of the files used by oracle isn't good enough.
The reason given went something like this,
"while oracle is running, it leaves certain files open. Consequently,
if you do a simple backup of the filesystem on which oracle resides,
even if no db transactions are pending, you aren't guaranteed to
capture the complete, latest state of the data."
