Re: IDS (IUS) backup and recovery??

Seth Grimes wrote: > > Anyone have opinions to share on use of ON-Tape vs. ON-Archive for > Informix-Dynamic Server (9.12, Solaris) backup and recovery? I haven't > worked much with the Online 7.x versions of these utilities but I > remember hearing bad things about ON-Archive. I'd be setting automatic > backup of logical logs and periodic DB logging, all to disk, with > system backups picking up the disk files nightly. ON-Bar isn't an > option because there's no storage manager in place. Thanks, My current site had onarchive installed when I arrived. I'd never used it before. They installed it because they didn't know much about Informix, wanted to dump to disk, and onarchive is the only supported alternative. Onarchive is difficult to get your mind around. Over the past year or so it's caused me more problems than the remainder of the product set put together. The most common problem is that the onarchive catalog often gets out of step with the actual archives/logs held on disk. Archives, and the continuous log daemon then fail. The only way to fix it is usually to do a buildsmi, thereby scrapping the onarchive catalog, and starting again. In short, it's a pile of crap. I'm phasing out onarchive now and moving back to ontape to disk, supported or not. Nobody in the UK Tech Support team seems to know much about onarchive, so here at least you're pretty much on your own. As David Williams said, Informix didn't write it and seem keen to distance themselves from it. Neil Truby Chase Manhattan Bank Bournemouth, UK neil.truby@chase.com