Backup options (including Arcserve Agent for Oracle)?

We are buying new server hardware and converting from Sybase to Oracle 8i/9i in the very near future. Our environment will be Intel servers with Win2000 Server, Arcserve 2000 for backup, and RAIDed drives. Our database consists mainly of our alumni and current students. My Sybase backup routine is an automated (nightly) DUMP of the database to a file on the file system which then goes to tape via the Arcserve NT agent. I had to restore once--because of drive failure (no RAID on that box).

My question is this: what are opinions on the best way to backup in a situation like ours? My initial inclination is to use the "hot" approach outlined in Loney's book: it is similar to what we do now and is fairly straightforward to implement. But without Oracle experience, I thought I should ask for other data points.

Also, Arcserve sells an Oracle agent, but it isn't quite clear to me what its advantage would be over this "hot" (archivelog) method. They claim to work at the logical level rather than with file objects, but I don't immediately see what that gets me other than--maybe?--not having to script the backup process.

-- 
Frank Burleigh
Indiana University School of Law
burleigh_at_indiana.edu