We're a rather large Sybase shop, and from what's been supplied in the OP I'm 
pretty certain that database is toast.

Over here, we do a rather complicated variant of Curtis' option 3 ('dump 
database' - using compress::5 - and backing up the resultant files).  Since we 
use the dump files to sync DR servers anyway, this was relatively trivial to 
integrate into our Networker procedures (though the backup script has gotten 
more and more complicated over the years).  It's quite amazing how well this 
works, and is a good replacement for the module (if you're willing to re-load 
the entire DB elsewhere for data research).

>From experimentation and testing, Option 1 *may* succeed if the files were 
>static (at least in Solaris8/10 under SPARC /w Sybase 12.5.x).  But its so 
>hit-and-miss I'd not try it for a production restore.

Option 2 would never be feasible for us - my backups would balloon over 100x if 
we tried that, and the data has never compressed.  As it was, enabling Sybase's 
compression allowed us 2-3x as much data per tape than letting the drive do it 
(even if the drive itself no longer compresses data).

--TSK

-----=====-----
Timothy Kimball, Sungard/BRASS



cpreston wrote:
> Since you weren't using the agent, how were you backing it up?  Given the 
> scenario you describe, though, I'm fearing the answer is that you weren't.  
> There are a number of possibilities here:
> 
> 1. You weren't shutting down the DB during backup, so the file was apparently 
> open and changing during backup.  The file was therefore skipped and isn't 
> available for restore.
> 2. The database is on raw partitions which aren't backed up by default.
> 3. You were backing up the database using a script and "dump database" to 
> disk, but you didn't back up THAT file.
> 
> How WERE you backing it up?
> 


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