Oracle flashback and guaranteed restore points

As explained in "Automatic Disk-Based Backup and Recovery: The Flash Recovery Area", the flash recovery area feature lets you set up a location on disk where the database can create and manage a variety of backup and recovery-related files on your behalf.

Using a flash recovery area simplifies the ongoing administration of your database by automatically naming recovery-related files, retaining them as long as they are needed for restore and recovery activities, and deleting them when they are no longer needed to restore your database and space is needed for some other backup and recovery-related purpose.

Your long-term backup and recovery administration can be greatly simplified by using a flash recovery area. Use of the flash recovery area is strongly recommended. You may want to set up a flash recovery area as one of the first steps in implemeting your backup strategy.

This section outlines the functions of the flash recovery area, identifies the files stored there, explains the rules for how files are managed there, and introduces the most important configuration options.