You can usually only restore to a computer system that’s
running the same operating system as the one from which the backups
were made. There may also be limitations on operating system and
Oracle release levels.
The backup process doesn’t take into account the database
objects that are stored within the database. The granularity of the
recovery in this case is the entire database.
Tip
Some techniques allow individual objects to be recovered from a
physical backup (these are discussed in later sections). However,
these techniques are time consuming, require additional disk space,
and need to be practiced before they are put into operation.