Re: Is it possible to tbtape on

>Is it possible to run tbtape on a mirrored disk image of informix dbspace ? >We have a HP system with HP-UX 9.05 and informix 5.03 UC1 (?) and system >comes to screatching halt whenever we start running tbtape to backup the >system while waiting for the second tape (we have a database larger than >a GB ). >>I'm not sure on the exact details, but it should be possible to a copy of the >>mirrored disk space (once taken out of the mirror so it remains stable) using >>a standard unix utility like dd, or something that handles a change in media >>like cpio (or a combination of the two). If you plan to use something other than tbtape, plan on taking the system offline to perform the archive. In addition, You cannot use your logical logs to recover since "dd" knows nothing about logical logs. The reason tbtape can hang the system if it cannot write to tape during an archive is because there are some situations in which the pages are copied to the archive tape from the physical log, not the chunk itself -- if a check point must occur, the physical log must be emptied -- and it can't be emptied if pages within the log must be archived and *there is no tape to write to* -- so the system will hang on a checkpoint request. J. Dority Seattle