Questions about Archive & Restore

Hi everybody, I have some basic questions about the best method to backup and restore Informix Online ( 7.22 + ) data. I realise that the lowest level of backup ( restore ) provided by any of the utilities is a dbspace. What happens if you lose just a few tables ?? Do we have to go to the full extent of restoring the entire dbspace onto a different machine and then copy the tables over ? Or restore an older version of the data on the current instance ? Is it also prudent to take an individual database level backup ? Everyday ?? The reason I'm asking this questions is that a couple of important tables were dropped from our production m/c and we are going through the process of recovery. What made a complex situation even complexer ( if such a word exists ) is that the production m/c ( from which data was lost ) and the other machine are running different versions of ODS. Which means we backup the other m/c, rollback to the older version, restore the dbspace, get the data, roll forward the newer ODS version and restore the original data and then transfer the data to the production server !! Anybody have any thoughts on this ?? Thanks in advance Sujata