ontape of large database

It's been so long since I used ontape to filesystem for a production database I don't know if this is possible. Our database is about 1.5TB. We usually use onbar with Tivoli and go to tape. We're going to migrate the database over to a new SAN by doing a backup and restore onto the new devices. I was thinking I can save a lot of time by using ontape to disk. btw, this is AIX5.3 and IDS10.0.FC5. Does anyone know if this is feasable ? I don't know what the largest filesize I can put on the aix filesystem. If it's only say 32GB then I'd have to manually do mv and touch commands each time prompted and have over 30 volumes. ( unless we install expect or something ). Any advice on that ? Thanks, floyd

Floyd, You can have large files on AIX file system, but you can also do the following with version 10. ontape -s -L 0 -t STDIO | split -a 4 -b 2147483648 -d - /data/backup/ ontape Adjust to your needs. This will split the backup into 2GB files named /data/backup/ontape0000 - ontape9999. Not sure if the -t STDIO is in 10, but you can change the onconfig for TAPEDEV to STDIO and use ontape -s -L 0 | split blah blah blah to do the same. You can also skip the disk altogether. ontape -s -L 0 -t STDIO | rsh informix@newserver /home/informix/ run_ontape_script_to_start_ontape-p.sh This wll do the backup and restore at the same time. If your network is not good, add gzip and gzip -d to reduce. Look in the admin guide for starting HDR via ontape. Same concept. Roy On Sep 17, 4:56 pm, "Floyd Wellershaus" <fl...@fwellers.com> wrote: > It's been so long since I used ontape to filesystem for a production database I don't know if this is possible. > Our database is about 1.5TB. We usually use onbar with Tivoli and go to tape. > We're going to migrate the database over to a new SAN by doing a backup and restore onto the new devices. > I was thinking I can save a lot of time by using ontape to disk. > btw, this is AIX5.3 and IDS10.0.FC5. > Does anyone know if this is feasable ? I don't know what the largest filesize I can put on the aix filesystem. If it's only say 32GB then I'd have to manually do mv and touch commands each time prompted and have over 30 volumes. ( unless we install expect or something ). > > Any advice on that ? > > Thanks, > floyd

On Sep 17, 12:56 pm, "Floyd Wellershaus" <fl...@fwellers.com> wrote: > It's been so long since I used ontape to filesystem for a production database I don't know if this is possible. > Our database is about 1.5TB. We usually use onbar with Tivoli and go to tape. > btw, this is AIX5.3 and IDS10.0.FC5. > Thanks, > floyd For 1.5TB, you will have to probably do something like what Roy indicated with splitting the files into smaller segments. For AIX 5.3, the JFS file system has a maximum file size of 2GB. If you have the "large-file enabled" option on, that increases to 64GB. The JFS2 file systems can theoretically make files as large as 1TB (in 32-bit mode) or 16TB (in 64-bit mode), but I have never tried that personally. Also, take note that although you can create files larger than 2GB, some utilities refuse to operate properly with these files. For example, if you use tar or cpio command to try and copy that 1TB file, it may copy the first 2GB and abort, or it may not even report a problem, but only writes the first 2GB and then completes as if all was well. (We use backup/restore to copy data files larger than 2GB because those utilities at least support the larger files.) http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.baseadmn/doc/baseadmndita/fs_jfs2.htm Regards, SteveN