Difference between physical and logical backup in oracle

Physical backup are backup of the physical files such as datafiles, control files, and archived redo logs. Ultimately, every physical backup is a copy of files storing database information to some other location, whether on disk or some offline storage such as tape.

Physical backup can be done via rman utility as below.

RMAN> backup database plus archivelog all;

Logical backup are backup of logical data (for example, tables,index,schema,stored procedures) exported from a database with an Oracle export utility and stored in a binary file, for later re-importing into a database using the corresponding Oracle import utility.

Export:-

$exp USERID=scott/tiger FULL=y FILE=myfull.dmp

$exp USERID=scott/tiger OWNER=(SCOTT,ALI) FILE=exp_own.dmp



Import:-

$imp USERID=scott/tiger FULL=y FILE=myfull.dmp