SE to Online

We are currently running SE on an AT&T 3B2/600 and plan to migrate to an HP 9000/877 in the near future. We have been planning to switch from SE to Online; however, I have read so many horror stories on this forum on problems (and complexity) with Online that I am having second thoughts. I would like some advice from those sites which have switched from SE to Online. Which engine is more reliable? From what I have read on the forum, restoring data from Online backups can be a very time consuming process. Is this true at most sites? How hard is it for a small staff (3 programmers) to maintain an Online database vice SE? For info, our system is online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our database is relatively small but is continuously updated by programs running from cron which transfer data from several computer systems over leased lines. The programmers are also the system administrators. We do not man the computer room after normal working hours, but are on call with pagers. Our users are on duty round the clock; however, their computer skills are minimal. Is the performance from raw disk i/o great enough to justify the complexity over using a cooked file? How much slower is a cooked file? Our HP877 will use a RAID disk system. Does this create any problems in setting up Online for raw disk i/o? We do not currently use a transaction database, so our software will have to be modified for Online. Is the response time from a transaction engine as good as a non-transaction engine? We have an occasional problem where users accessing the system by modem may lose their connection in the middle of adding or modifying records. With SE we may end up with a few duplicate records when they log back in and reinput the data. Will Online cause us more or less problems when this happens? One of the main appeals of Online is the capability to do periodic bchecks without taking the system down. Online backup capability is a secondary consideration. We currently unload all modified records every hour to ascii files which are then transferred over a LAN to a backup computer where they are automatically loaded into a backup database. This works reasonably well and gives us an online backup database within one hour of the primary which can be continuously accessed for reports. Is there a way to transfer Online backup files over a LAN to a backup computer and automatically load them? (The same as we are doing now in a crude way with hourly unloads) If so, can the database be accessed while the backups are being loaded? I am also interested in the capability to simultaneously update two or more database engines on different servers from one client using ISTAR. If one of the servers is down, what does this do to the transaction? Does it still update the server which is up? Our goal is to have duplicate databases on different computers, both for backup and to distribute the system load in producing reports and providing info to remote systems. The duplicate database(s) can be within an hour of the primary (real time would be even better). Any ideas on how to accomplish this?