Onbar is the best backup utility I have used with backing up and restoring
databases. RMAN can't come close. Once again, I would absolutely hate to
see Informix and its utilities disappear. I hate ORACLE!

-----Original Message-----
From: malcolm.weallans@btopenworld.com
[mailto:malcolm.weallans@btopenworld.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 12:12 PM
To: informix-list@iiug.org
Subject: Re: ontape vs onbar - the gospel according to malcolm


I would like to impart the benefit of my wisdom to this topic.

in the beginning there was Turbo. Turbo had to be stopped in order to
get consistent backups. It was not good, but verily it worked quite
well.

next came Online. Online was much better. It had this new utility
called ontape which allowed online archiving which meant that 24 by 7
performance could be provided. With the combination of backing up the
system and the logs recovery was possible to the point of the last
committed transaction.

But ontape was, and verily still is, very limited. It worked really
well if all the data could be archived to one tape drive. It worked
really well if it was operated in an attended fashion.

But sadly, ontape was not enough for many database administrators.
their databases could not be backed up to one tape, they wanted
unattended overnight backups, and they wanted to integrate the
archives and log backups into their enterprise backup systems. hence
onbar was born. It did virtually the same job as ontape but in a more
sophisticated way. The combination of onbar and ISM was the
equivalent of ontape, but offered even more flexibility in recovery,
including such things as point-in-time recovery.

But it is very apparent that there are many of you who have been in
the darkness about this for many years. maybe we should all learn
more about onbar, after all, an IBM Informix tech support person told
us today that ontape wasn't supported any more. Interesting!
sending to informix-list