Well, with flashcopy our backups should be something like "split mirror, backup mirror, leave production alone". Simple like that, no recovery catalog, incremental levels etc. However, backups should be almost always full backups.

With RMAN, we can use incremental backups, compress backupsets, perform block-level recovery etc. But since backups would be done directly on production, backup time would probably be greater than Flashcopy's one.

If RMAN+Flashcopy is possible, we'd get RMAN benefits without affecting production directly. But I didn't understand yet how RMAN would access the mirror volumes as if they were a database itself.

Any misconception of mine?