Need backup advice

I was hoping I could get some advice on choosing between ontape and onbar. I am familiar with the basic differences in the two. What has me concerned is that I've been reading chapter 7 of Carlton Doe's book Administering Informix Dynamic Server where he mentions that "development has indicated that future IDS release will not include the ISM..." So I'm wondering if it would be best to just stick with ontape? We use Arcserve for our back up solution and they doesn't support Informix on Linux, just Windows. In other words our enterprise wide backup solution is only going to be used to copy ontape or onbar backup files off of disk. Not to mention that I haven't been able to find any onbar based backup scripts, it seems that they are all ontape based. Or is using onbar just as simple as running onbar -b -L0 from cron? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. john. -- John Cordell Systems Engineer Harte-Hanks

Running onbar can be as simple as running -b -L0, though many run onbar as a slave to their enterprise archiving manager rather than run it directly. However, you would have to configure SOME storage manager and yes, there are rumors and more than rumors about ISM going away in the near future perhaps to be replaced by something easier to use (I hope), so you may just want to use ontape for now and evaluate onbar again once the next release is out in the springtime. Art S. Kagel Advanced DataTools (www.advancedatatools.com) Blog: http://informix-myview.blogspot.com/ Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that my own opinions are my own opinions and do not reflect on my employer, Advanced DataTools, the IIUG, nor any other organization with which I am associated either explicitly, implicitly, or by inference. Neither do those opinions reflect those of other individuals affiliated with any entity with which I am affiliated nor those of the entities themselves. On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 10:37 AM, JOHN CORDELL <john_cordell@harte-hanks.com>wrote: > I was hoping I could get some advice on choosing between ontape and onbar. > > I am familiar with the basic differences in the two. What has me concerned > is > that I've been reading chapter 7 of Carlton Doe's book Administering > Informix > Dynamic Server where he mentions that "development has indicated that > future > IDS release will not include the ISM..." So I'm wondering if it would be > best > to just stick with ontape? We use Arcserve for our back up solution and > they > doesn't support Informix on Linux, just Windows. In other words our > enterprise > wide backup solution is only going to be used to copy ontape or onbar > backup > files off of disk. > > Not to mention that I haven't been able to find any onbar based backup > scripts, it seems that they are all ontape based. Or is using onbar just as > simple as running onbar -b -L0 from cron? > > Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks. > john. > -- > John Cordell > Systems Engineer > Harte-Hanks > > > > ******************************************************************************* > Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum. > > --90e6ba6e8e1c66e79c04cdd66628

My $.02... I am not sure about when ISM will go away but that would be a consideration if you depended on it. You would also have to manage that disk space as well. As far as onbar being "that easy" - it is. You do have more versatility but ontape is also "that easy" and requires no initial setup. It is also easier to restore to another system because you do not need to make your storage manager backups available to that system. Not even sure if you could do that with ISM. Dan -------------------------------------------------- From: "JOHN CORDELL" <john_cordell@harte-hanks.com> Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2012 11:37 AM To: <ids@iiug.org> Subject: Need backup advice [28710] > I was hoping I could get some advice on choosing between ontape and onbar. > > I am familiar with the basic differences in the two. What has me concerned > is > that I've been reading chapter 7 of Carlton Doe's book Administering > Informix > Dynamic Server where he mentions that "development has indicated that > future > IDS release will not include the ISM..." So I'm wondering if it would be > best > to just stick with ontape? We use Arcserve for our back up solution and > they > doesn't support Informix on Linux, just Windows. In other words our > enterprise > wide backup solution is only going to be used to copy ontape or onbar > backup > files off of disk. > > Not to mention that I haven't been able to find any onbar based backup > scripts, it seems that they are all ontape based. Or is using onbar just > as > simple as running onbar -b -L0 from cron? > > Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks. > john. > -- > John Cordell > Systems Engineer > Harte-Hanks > > > ******************************************************************************* > Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum. >

I prefer ontape. agree with Dans comments- about restoring to other systems. For large system onbar is probbaly better as you can use the Parallelism feature. We tried using onbar with comvault at our site with bad results. Time to back up db 9 hours, with on tape 40 mins. This was not a fault with onbar but rather with how comvault handled things,and how it was set up- another agency runs our comvault backups.

If you have in your environment few and/or slow disks, using onbar with many threads in parallel will drive you to poor performance, because you will face I/O bottleneck reading the data in the database. Other issue that many times many people forget is: the production is running in parallel as well. I don't believe that parallelism is always the Best solution, it depends on your entire environment. Sometimes the bottleneck is not to save the tape during the backup window, but reading the data. If you have many and fast disks and many tape drives, you should choose onbar. If you have few or slow disks and only one tape drive, ontape should be the best option. Best regards, Celso Cabral Coimbra Administrador de Banco de Dados ClearTech Ltda "Trust at the heart of Communications" Tel. (11) 3576-4509 -----Mensagem original----- De: ids-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:ids-bounces@iiug.org] Em nome de KARL OLIVER Enviada em: terça-feira, 6 de novembro de 2012 18:00 Para: ids@iiug.org Assunto: Re: Need backup advice [28714] I prefer ontape. agree with Dans comments- about restoring to other systems. For large system onbar is probbaly better as you can use the Parallelism feature. We tried using onbar with comvault at our site with bad results. Time to back up db 9 hours, with on tape 40 mins. This was not a fault with onbar but rather with how comvault handled things,and how it was set up- another agency runs our comvault backups. ******************************************************************************* Forum Note: Use "Reply" to post a response in the discussion forum.