Hi Guys,
We have a 800GB warehouse running on oracle 8.0.6(soon going to be 9i) in no-archive log mode. For backups, every night we export all the regular tables plus the current partitions of all the partitioned tables(I know this is un-acceptable but unfortunately management has been fine so far with export being the ONLY mode of backup).The export job takes about 5-6 hours.This covers us if we lose a table or so but recently we lost 3 datafiles from 3 different tablespaces due to a hardware problem and we have to recreate all of them which took us a significant amount of time.We are planning to either move to archive log or start taking cold backup every night. My concern is :

1. If we move to archive log mode , how does it impact the loading time ? we load about 6GB data every day(insets/updates) and it takes about 18 hours. Will archive log result in slower loading time ? Does any one here has similar experience ?
2. If we move to cold backup solution in no-archive log mode , is it possible to copy 800GB in 4-5 hours ? Can anyone here please suggest some software/hardware for this purpose ?

Your help will be greatly appreciated .

Thanks.