Have to be a bit careful about saying, "Don't do cold backups!"

[devils advocate]
It really depends on what type of system you run. I always work on OLTP systems, so using archiving and hot backups is the best option, but that may not be the case in warehousing situations.

There was a thread on the dizwell forum some time ago, where a number of waerhousing guys said they run in noarchivelog mode and do cold backups after dataloads once a week. In that scenario, running in archivelog mode and doing hot backups may not be all it's cracked up to be...
[/devils advocate]

Cheers

Tim...