DBMS/Recovery

To restore a physical backup of a data file or control file is to reconstruct it and make it available to the Oracle database server. To recover a restored data file is to update it by applying archived redo logs and online redo logs, that is, records of changes made to the database after the backup was taken. If you use RMAN, then you can also recover data files with incremental backups, which are backups of a data file that contain only blocks that changed after a previous incremental backup.