RMAN is an abbreviation for the term Recovery Manager. The Recovery Manager is an application developed by Oracle that, as the name suggests, helps you to back up your database files and restore as well as recover them in the case of data loss or if the file gets corrupted or deleted. However, it is not an individual application, but is part of the Oracle database server. When you install the Oracle database server, you get the RMAN as a part of the package. The RMAN is very handy for database administrators (DBAs) as it takes care of the hassles involved with recovering database files. Even if you lose a file or data, you know that you can rely on the RMAN to have already performed a backup and to also help you recover the lost file.

The RMAN was added on to the dataset server only in the 8.0 version of Oracle. It is, therefore, not compatible with the earlier versions of Oracle. Therefore, if you want to make use of the RMAN application, you will have to upgrade to at least Oracle 8.0.