I am changing the characterset of my systems and was told to perform a full backup of the system.

If I am performing thisd on a production system in archivelog mode, can I take my regular hot backup (and backups of the archives), will this be good enough?

This way I can minimize downtime.

Thanks in advance,
Nirasha

BTW I am on Oracle 8.1.6 and am using the alter database command.