Re: Informix support of ONTAPE as cron

Con Woodall wrote: > > CAUTION ???? > > On the subject of ontape to cron with output to disk, > > Over the last several years, the hook in any scheme writing ontape archive > files to disk instead of tape was the apparent refusal of Informix > to support an attempt to recover should you need to recover from > disk. The documented, supportable approach to recovery was ontape -r > with a tape drive in the TAPEDEV specification in the onconfig file. > At one point, I called Informix tech support, opened a case on the > question, and had it confirmed that indeed they did not support the > disk archive/restore cycle. > > I think I noted recently that someone saying they thought Informix had > changed their position on that. Can whoever made that observation please > confirm it? I had a recent (past couple of months) reply from someone from Informix in the US assuring me that recovery from disk IS supported. Unfortunately, I can't find it. UK Tech. Support told me that the reason it wasn't supported isn't, as you might think, because it doesn't work, but because users were forever over-writing archives/log back-ups that they needed. > > By the way, I am assuming that someone has actually recovered from > disk in the environment described in the latest shell script. Is that > so? Haven't seen the rest of the thread, but I've always used archive to disk in every site I've worked at and never had a problem. With the supposed 100% reliability/recoverability of disks, we back-up up our logs to disk as well at my current site. > Even more by the way, has anyone ever had a failure using the disk > approach and gotten support from Informix? I had a recent query where the log roll-forward received an unexpected error at the end (due to end-of-file handling of the disk). The roll-forward was actually fine. UK Tech Supoort were quite happy to research it and tell me that it was a known occurrence. Neil Truby Chase Manhattan Bank Bournemouth, UK neil.truby@chase.com