Re: Opinion of a backup and recovery strategy.

Depends on what you mean by restore. If you aren't talking about restoring transactions you can use a logical backup (exp/imp). You should not use exp/imp as your primary backup strategy. I would guess that what you mean by "restore the same backup many times" is you want to go back to a particular known point. This is why many products are delivered by imp.

Note that you can backup by tablespace.

This is why people say a reason to have multiple instances is differing restoration requirements.

jg

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