Tape Devices for Archive (ON-Archive) 

Make sure you have sufficient tape devices (that is, drives) to archive the entire Informix database at level-0 without operator attention (that is, in unattended mode) using ON-Archive . For setup details, see Editing the File config.arc for ON-Archive.

Initially one device (supporting a single volume set and volume) is sufficient. However, as your database grows you might want to archive the system to multiple tape drives – either in parallel or sequentially. Multiple tape drives have the following benefits:

This only applies to parallel archive. Two or more tape devices can be writing data at the same time, giving you a reduced elapsed time for the archive.

This applies to both parallel and sequential archives. In either case, the total volume of archive data is spread across more tape volumes and drives, allowing a greater quantity of data to be archived without an operator changing tapes.

If you can, it is best to have enough tape devices, volume sets, and volumes to mount a volume from each volume set on a separate tape device and archive the entire system in unattended mode.

SAP recommends that you have one or more tape devices dedicated to archiving.

 

See also:

Informix documentation