Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) is a high availability feature that provides database backup, restore, and recovery capabilities.

Usage examples.

Backup myinstance database files

# su - oracle
% rman target sys/password@myinstance nocatalog
RMAN> BACKUP AS BACKUPSET DEVICE TYPE DISK DATABASE;

Backup myinstance archive logs

# su - oracle
% rman target sys/password@myinstance nocatalog
RMAN> BACKUP DEVICE TYPE DISK ARCHIVELOG ALL;

Delete myinstance backups older than a week

# su - oracle
% rman target sys/password@myinstance nocatalog
RMAN> DELETE NOPROMPT ARCHIVELOG all completed before 'SYSDATE-7';
RMAN> DELETE NOPROMPT BACKUP completed before 'SYSDATE-7';