Re: Archive / Logical Log Backup To Disk

Glyn, Your right the OS can hold back writes to disk and cause you grief. But the advantages of not having to buy an extra tape drive and the much higher reliability of disk drives over tape drives far outweigh this. If the OS had not written out all the pages before a crash then when a crash occurred you would be restoring to an earlier point in time, the restore will still work. Regards David Ashby ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ I have been following this thread with some interest of late. I was always under the impression that if you backup to disk rather than tape then you are at the same risk as if you use cooked files rather than raw disk, i.e. (quoting from the Informix OnLine Administrator's Guide v5.0 "Cooked files are easier to allocate than raw disk space, However you sacrifice reliability ... cooked files are unreliable because I/O on a cooked file is managed by the UNIX operating system. A write to a cooked file can result in data being written to a memory buffer in the UNIX file manager instead of being written immediately to disk. As a consequence UNIX cannot guarantee that the committed data has actually reached the disk ..."). Am I missing something here, or does dumping either Logical Logs and/or Archives to disk fall into the above category ? I am particularly interested as another Informix-OnLine System Administrator on our site is intending to dump to disk and has asked my advice. The system I administer uses tapes for both Archive and Logical Log dumps. Any advice/comments welcomed. Regards Glyn Balmer I.T. Consultant BICC Cables Limited Erith Kent UK Informix-OnLine 5.01 (looking forward to an imminent move to 7.2x!)