At work we have steadily been making progress in the switchover to new software on a new database structure in Informix. We have also learned the hard way that BrightStor's Informix client is useless. It backs up the database just fine, but cannot be used to restore it because they embed the brightstor-specific information into the tape header itself, forcing you to use Brightstor to restore the data. You cannot restore it using the native tools that even Brightstor calls to create the backup, and Brightstor cannot restore it because they have it arranged so that you must be logged in as 'root' to run the restore program, and must be logged in as 'caroot' to connect to the database while restoring. Since you cannot be two people at once, and the ca_auth program apparently failed at making root=caroot, this is doomed to failure. So now it appears that all of our careful backups of Informix using BrightStor are worse than useless - they are misleading.