Hi,

I have a problem with informix ontape utility.

the ontape utility worked well until i add a new database to my server.
TAPESIZE parameter in onconfig file was 2048000 , i increase it to
5120000 but the ontape stops as soon as the quantity written reachs
2GB and i have this error message :

Archive failed - function write to tape failed code -1 errno 27

my configuration parameters are :

# System Archive Tape Device

TAPEDEV /app/informix920uc2/ifxbackup/db_bkp.dat # Tape device path
TAPEBLK 16 # Tape block size (Kbytes)
TAPESIZE 5120000 # Maximum amount of data to put on
tape (Kbytes)

is INFORMIX able to backup an instance whose size is bigger than 2 GB on a hard disk ? (not on tape)

is there any other utility which can backup more than 2 GB on disk ?

Thanks a lot .

I don't think the error is because of the informix ontape command.
This seems to be a system error causing that error.
Because I am also backup close to 50GB data everynight using ontape -L -0, and we don't have any problem. I believe the problem is your device and the blocksize that you are specified. I don't think the block size of your hard disk is 16. It should be more than 16. try to change to 512. You better check your OS block size first.

Second, Informix performs some internal steps before performing a backup, enough space should be available for the logical log. if total logical log free space is less than one halg of a logical log file, the process will be aborted.

Check those first and try again.
Otherwise, Just use dbexport instead. It should be more reliable if you want to have a copy on the hard disk.

thanks for your replay.

do you backup your 50 GB on disk or directly on a tape ?.

my backup device is on the disk.

I am using the DLT tape, but the device should not be a problem. Tape or hard disk, but have you checked your block size of your hard disk. As I mentioned, your hard disk block size should not be 16 unless do it in purpose. Because Informix is kind of picky on this parameters. This would be the first one to try. try to change the onconfig to 512 instead and re-run the ontape.

If you don't want to change any configuraton, as I mentioned before, you can also use the dbexport utitlity.

ontape does have a 2GB limitation on writing to disk. This is not an operating system limitation. This limitation only disappears in version 9.4 of the software, which is currently in Beta

thanks a lot for your replies.

Yes, it can. It is not ontape limitation

For example, in AIX it is necessary to create FS's with large file support.
That's all. It is an OS matter

Anyways you can do the following sily trick

Put your TAPEDEV to a pipe file

TAPEDEV /foo/pipe

start your backup.

in other session, script the following command:

cat pipe | gzip -c > foo.dat

Believe me, you can save tons of MB's. we use it at work, completely automatized and is 100% reliable.

Hope it helps
greets

Use onbar instead of ontape for eliminate the limitation of ontape and easy to plan the next growth of database because onbar doesn't have ontape's limitation

Hi

I work on PC, my dbspaces are quite small but larger than 2G + I don't want to be caught with logs backup stopped because of 2G limit.

The onbar is very complicated and much slower (because the databases are quite small). The restore takes hours, where the same ontape restore took only minutes.

I would love to go back to the ontape, does anyone know how to do this trick in windows?

Thanks
Dafna