Starting ontape

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Starting ontape

When you need more than one tape during a backup, ontape prompts for each additional tape.

If the database server is in maintenance mode, for example, during a conversion, then ontape can only be started by one of the following users:

root
informix
The user who started the database server (if not the user root or informix)

Warning:

Do not start ontape in background mode (that is, using the UNIX & operator on the command line). You could also need to provide input from the terminal or window. When you execute ontape in background mode, you can miss prompts and delay an operation.

The ontape utility does not include default values for user interaction, nor does it support retries. When ontape expects a yes/no response, it assumes that any response not recognized as a "yes" is "no".