Thanks for REs my urgent call

Hi all, I would like to thank you for answering my call. Specially to Jonathan Leffler for his speedy answer and to Scott Black for his brilliant exposition on how to revive an informix erased database. Following is the story and what we did. An engineer from Baan, was doing via modem some minor parameter changes oriented via phone by an informix one, and he mistyped the initialization command, erasing my company data. The next time I tried to access Baan IV, the terminal sent me a database error. After some checking, I found that all data was missing and I post the message. Our latest backup was 3 hours old, so, personnel from Baan came and restored the Backup. I made a memo for all my company presenting a plan of action, focused on restoring restricted information services in less than 1 hour after restore (of course, without data lost). At the same time, we made with the directives a priority list, so most urgent services were up first, and manually restored the missing information during the day, with the assistance of Baan personnel, which also checked the database integrity (my principal fear). About 24 hours later, we had all our information up and running. My morals: 1. Never allow super users on the modem (you don't know what they type and you can't stop them). 2. As a super user: never type without knowing what are you typing. 3. Backups level 0 are a must, but also you have to use level 1 and 2. 4. You own the database, you type the commands. 5. Expert eyes are always better than expert ears. 6. Crash restoring is not as terrible as it sounds. A final question: Why the database initialization command is the same startup one? Informix should make two different commands for that. Is not hard and it's useful (at least safer). bye... -- Arturo Rodr'guez Mutis Director de Inform'tica Melexa Ltda. PBX (571) 360 3055 FAX (571) 360 2562 e-mail melexa@colomsat.net.co