Greetings,

 We have a client running their main business application using an Informix 10.0 back end.  We would like to capture this server using Shadow Protect (Other servers are already backed up using Shadow Protect) but are aware of previous backup issues when users are logged in. 

I cannot find any information about informix being VSS aware and don't really want to test during the day if I can avoid it.

Is anyone aware of issues with ShadowProtect backing up a running Informix database?  Has anyone done it?

TIA,

Brett

I've never tried this, and I think the lack of response may have already influenced your view on what to do next.

If not, here are some additional thoughts.....
Informix does not appear to be VSS-aware. However, it does appear to allow you to take a db backup when the db is active.

You might get some useful feedback and advice from the Informix forum.

The only thing I would suggest is that you could use the Informix ON-bar feature to create a consistent image of the Informix database. ON-bar has a command line interface and will make sure that the db is correctly quiesced before it performs a db backup.

So you might have a number of options:
1) Run ON-bar from a schedule task, or cron job, and get it to produce a db backup to disk. Run this outside the SP backup schedule.
2) If the ON-bar interface allows you to quiesce the database quickly, you could write/use a simple script to do this immediately prior to SP performing a snapshot. You'd probably also have to run a script, after the snapshot, to tell ON-bar to put the database back into its normal state.

Where you put the db backup is up to you. You could write to the same partition(s) that you then backup with SP, or, you could write to a separate disk (e.g. the one you store your backups on).

If you ever restore the system you'd need to restore the partition(s) using SP and then restore the Informix db using the ON-bar created db backup.

One other thought. If you are worried about testing your backup strategy on a "live" server then you could take a backup out of hours and restore it to a virtual machine. As long as your virtual machine is not on the same network you could run through a few backup scenarios without impacting the live server. 

Thanks for the response.  For the sake of the next guy with this scenario, here's what we did:

We eventually waited until processing was completed and a full backup was done then we got a couple of users to login and took a snapshot of the running database.  I can report that it did not impact on the users or the database at all, completely unlike what we have experienced with online BAckup Exec file level backups.  We were then able to successfully HIR the image and bring the database online without any issues.

 The whole process worked better than we imagined.