RE: how to ontape to disk

With v10 you can set TAPEDEV in your $ONCONFIG to STDIO or a disk file name
(full path + file - e.g. /opt/informix/backup/tape). There is also a
TAPESIZE in which you can indicate whatever size you want. I'm not sure why
you would want to change "tapes" at 1GB. ontape will prompt you to change
tapes, I suppose you could use "expect" to watch for that, rename your
tapefile to something and then send a return to ontape - but I don't
understand why you would want to. It might make sense if you were backing
up 2TB of disk to a little 100GB drive and had to swap out occasionally.
But for that sort of thing you really should be using "onbar" and a storage
manager anyway. I would recommend reading the "Backup and Restore Guide".

Note, if you do use "expect", and TAPEDEV=file, you will always backup to
that file, you will need to move the backed up file out of the way (rename
it) and place a new "empty" file in it's place:

mv $INFORMIXDIR/backup/tape $INFORMIXDIR/backup/tape.$n
touch $INFORMIXDIR/backup/tape
n = n + 1

What you might also consider is backing up through a compression program.
Set TAPEDEV to STDIO and then "ontape -s -L 0 | gzip - > backup.gz" (doing
from memory, may have something off there). This will compress your backup
on the fly and make it take less space and run faster. It reduces I/O work
which is typically the bottleneck - but CPU will peak higher.

cheers
j.

Sane ego te vocavi. Forsitan capedictum tuum desit.

-----Original Message-----
From: informix-list-bounces@xxxxxxxx
[mailto:informix-list-bounces@xxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of spender@xxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 11:20 PM
To: informix-list@xxxxxxxx
Subject: how to ontape to disk


Hello:

Environment:
AIX 5.3
IDS 10 FC6

How to use "ontape" command to backup database to file(juse 1G), and
automatic change volume name like vtape.1, vtape.2, vtape.3 etc....

game me some support




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Relevant Pages

  • Re: how to ontape to disk
    ... setting TAPESIZE larger than you need will not waste disk. ... IDS will not write out the full maximum size of the file to TAPESIZE in any case, only the size actually needed rounded up to the next TAPEBLK blocksize. ... However, if your OS can handle an archive file large enough to hold all of your chunks and any physical log records written during the archive period, then you can set TAPESIZE to zero and ontape will continue to write to the file until the filesystem fills up or the OS returns a 'too large' error before prompting for a new tape file. ... I would recommend reading the "Backup and Restore Guide". ...
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  • Re: how to ontape to disk
    ... Version 11 has the ability to have TAPEDEV set to a directory, sort of "set and forget" ... ... setting TAPESIZE larger than you need will not waste disk. ... However, if your OS can handle an archive file large enough to hold all of your chunks and any physical log records written during the archive period, then you can set TAPESIZE to zero and ontape will continue to write to the file until the filesystem fills up or the OS returns a 'too large' error before prompting for a new tape file. ... I would recommend reading the "Backup and Restore ...
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    ... If I understand correctly you are using ontape -c to backup tapes to disk? ... Is there a way to automatically and continuously backup the Logical Logs to a file without tying up windows running ontape -c? ...
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