Re: Online 7.1 Archiving question.

hi, > 1. Would we be better off using Onarchive? or "Onbar" (whatever that is) . i haven't seen onbar yet, but it is supposed to be a better utility than onarchive. i have only used onarchive a little, and as far as i know, it has a good reputation for being reliable, but it is clumsy. it was developed in a VMS enviornment, and is about as un-unix like as it gets. i would like to see what onbar is all about, i don't like using onarchive. > 2. How many tape drives do we need? 3? one for the database archive, one for > the logical logs and one for Unix? depends on how frequently you are a) archiving, and b) in need of a tape drive for other things. we do a level 1 mon-thrs, and a level 0 on friday. this leaves our archive drive free most of the time, and i use it for unloading data, or whatever i need a tape drive for. the logical log drive is in current use, so it is dedicated, but the archive drive does other things as needed. > 3. Given that a frequent level 0 archive (or it's equivalent in Onarchive) > negates the need for previous logical log backups, do we really only need one > tape for logical logs (cycled suitably frequently), residing permanently in > one of the tape drives? even in onarchive, logical log backups are separate and *crucial*! you must have logical log backups to bring your system to a current state from a restore. also, if you do a partial restore, (the rootdbs and a few other dbspaces, but not the whole system), onarchive actaully 0's out all the log files! it is expecting you to restore log files, because as you have only restored some of the dbspaces, the system could really be out of sync. if a database has a table in a separate dbspace, and that was restored but the dbspace with the rest of the database tables wasn't, it will need the logical logs to bring the system in sync. i learned that the hard way, and had to have informix dial in and create a log file on the fly for me. it wasn't a production database though, so i knew i was taking a chance with it, but i wanted to experiment with onarchive. nuff said? mickm