My question may/could be really trivial, but I'm in big hurry and need accurate expert advice quickly, so pardon me if I may appear too candid (some googling didn't gave me any clear answer).
I have been assigned the task to perform an Informix databse data dump, for backup purpose and replication. The problem is that there is absolutely NO ONE (including me) experimented with Informix who knows how to do this.
Since this task is of medium priority, and since I'm currently overbooked with other of highest priority, I try to avoid by all means an expensive try/catch error experimentation. I can't afford the time to play with tools I don't know, which could costs me several day.
Do you have a tapedevice mounted to the system or accessible in the network? I think the 'ontape' utility is the easiest way of performing a complete datadump, including logical logs, of data managed by a server. In order to restore the data from this tape you need a similarly configured target server. So restore to the same IDS will work fine, for replication to another IDS it must be a copy of the source server.
To get a (textfile) dump of a complete database, including schema, for migration to another server/OS probably the 'dbexport' and 'dbimport' utilities are the simplest.