Informix Backup/Restore Issues

We've been using Informix for some time and we like the product alot. Some comments about backup and restore: We understand Informix strategy of backing up the whole ONLINE and all its configurations, but there are times when we need an online backup of ONLINE but in the format of an export i.e ASCII files... this is good for some of our disaster recovery planning, to bring data to another machine with different harddisk configurations and if we used the standard ONLINE archive, we wouldn't be able to do it. Right now, we would have to open the database exclusively for this and that's no good for our users... Since Informix is on the subject of backups, hope u guys are looking into the problems encountered with BLOBs in BLOBSPACES during backups... I visited Menlo Park in May and told Shirley about the problem and hope someone will take this up maybe in Version 8. Thanks.