On a higher level, there are two types of backup accessible in Oracle: physical and logical.  Physical backup creates and saves copies of physical database files (such as data files, control files, redo logs and other executables) for the future. This can be accomplished through the use of either operating system utilities or RMAN.  In contrast, logical backup allows you to backup specific database objects like as tables, views, indexes, stored procedures and so on using Oracle's Export/Import application.