Help! Newbie project skidding...

I'm working on getting a backup/recovery plan in place for a Informix-based system a vendor is bringing in here. The vendor is giving us the incredibly unrealistic Informix line on backups (i.e., 2 dedicated tape drives, no background backups, etc.). We want to do a weekly level 0, nightly level 2's, and size the logical logs so that they never cycle through all the logs between archives, so (theoretically) we don't have to back up the logs. After each archive, we manually 'backup' the logs and send them to /dev/null, to release them. Problem is now that during our practice restore, we don't know how to make the recovery process use the logs that are on-line, it appears to only want logs that are backed up to tape. Can we do the scenario we want to? How do make the recovery process only use the logs on-line? Our project is skidding badly because we're scrambling to get this backup/recovery plan nailed down w/ little vendor assistance, any help at this point would be greatly appreciated!!! TIA- Melinda McGee Lead DBA