Cold Backup

1. The Cold Backup.

Shut down the database and perform a cold backup by going disk by disk and backing up all files in the [oracle] directories. When complete, restart the database.
You may need to put an automated check into your backup program to use cold backups effectively, as several situations can cause the database shutdown to fail. For example, deadlocked users can prevent a SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE from working. Also, "memory leaks" can keep the database is a suspended mode - in which the only solution is to SHUTDOWN ABORT. So add a script to your shutdown commands that does an independent check to see if the database actually went down.
Some DBAs prefer choose to use the following command sequence:
shutdown abort;
startup;
shutdown immediate;
That way, they can be sure the database goes down via the SHUTDOWN ABORT command, and then shut it down cleanly via the SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE command. The alternative is to use just a SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE, followed by a separate command that checks to make sure the shutdown worked