Thank you guys for the replies. I will try to give whatever information available at this stage :

1. This is an OLTP environ for financial transactions. So around 3500 records are expected to be present in the beginning of production.

2. Expecting a change of data to the order of 500M

3. 15-20 minutes, hopefully.

4. Solaris 2.8 and Oracle 8i

5. Downtime of only 20-25 minutes during snapshots

Expecting to have a standby DB for the prod DB. Should each of the prod and Standby DBs have a Catalog DBs. Is it necessary to have a back up for the Catalog DBs too.

Appreciate your suggestions for the best backup and recovery strategy.