standby DB is good option
We have 24x7 quite critical system (kind of US911 but for Iceland ) and standby DB is a nice solution. It can be created w/o stopping main db from hot backup (if interested, I have intructions for WinNT but generally the only difference from normal db is that you have to use "alter database mount standby database" instead of just "startup mount" before restoring DB from hot backup) and then you can make backups of standby db instead. If you have to recover activating standby is much faster than recovering main db.