Oracle 11g ASM supports ASM FTP, by which operations on ASM files and directories can be
performed similarly to conventional operations on normal files using conventional File Transfer
Protocol (FTP). A typical use of such access to an ASM file can be to copy ASM files from one
database to another.
The Oracle database leverages the virtual folder feature of XML DB that provides a way to
access the ASM files and directories through XML DB protocols such as FTP, Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and programmatic APIs. An ASM virtual folder is mounted as
/sys/asm within the XML DB hierarchy. The folder is called “virtual” because nothing is physically
stored in XML DB. All operations are handled by underlying ASM components.
for example,
[oracle@rac1 ~]$ ftp
ftp> open rac1 7777
ftp> use system
ftp> passwd manager
ftp> cd /sys/asm/
ftp> ls
ftp> cd dga
ftp> cd dba
ftp> ls
ftp> bin
ftp> get data01.dbf
ftp> quit
[oracle@rac1 ~]$ ls