Re: Are your 7.1 backups/restores ok?

michalis@panix.com (Petros Michalis) wrote: >I'm desperately trying to use onarchive/ontape on informix online 7.1 >but both utilities seem to have serious problems. In the beginning >onarchive seemed to be the ideal utility but somehow the requests >were never executed by onautovop for automatic backups scheduling... >Informix support themselves admitted that onarchive has serious flaws. The perils of bought in technology, eh? :) >So I turned to ontape which seems to do the backups fine until the >point where I actually had to restore something. Ontape took the >ridiculous amount of 8 hours to restore a 1.5 Gb dbspace! That essentially >means that restoring a 100Gb database would send the whole derivatives >trading floor home for a few days! This is unacceptable! >I noticed that informix would only read from tape (exabyte) once every >7-10 secs so I also considered shutting down informix to speedup the >processing of dbspaces...well, can't be done as the manual says, you >need informix up if you want to restore individual dbspaces. Petros, Your points are all noted and pretty much accepted. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of OnArchive experience, as I consult to people and my own internal systems certainly do not warrant OnArchive for backups! However, given that you are running a 100GB database, you *are* in the OnArchive league. The problem with OnTape is the "all-or-nothing" approach. However, OnArchive actually merits a more complex backup system than you seem to have. You should, ideally, have one backup device per DBSPACE (extravagant, I know!). You should then backup each DBSPACE in parallel and you would then be able to restore in parallel. I am extremely wary of unattended backups at the best of times. Are you certain that the cron jobs to fire up the OnAutoVOps is actually running? Are you aware that each OnAutoVOp only handles one job in the queue? (Sorry if I'm belabouring the obvious!) I would rather attempt to get attended backups going via OnArchive and then look at the unattended option once that was stable. I'd like to reiterate that you should seriously consider getting some additional backup devices. Hope this helps. -- Cheers, Billy ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- INCLUDE "Disclaimer.4gh" -- my opinions are INCLUDE "FlamesToDevNull.4gh" -- flamers, eat my shorts! INCLUDE "CaveatEmptor.4gh" -- take my advice at your own risk INCLUDE "ThirtySomething.4gh" -- header file for this class -- Written by : Billy Wheeler, Date: today -- Copyright (c) 1995, The West Solutions Group