Thank for your help..

I will stick with making a back up...

My site is currently running fine on the machine and I prefer to
deveolp the new verion of the site on my windows machine and have it
working before touching the server..

Thanks again for educating me on the proper way to copy a database.

Jason

--- In ib-support@yahoogroups.com, Paul Vinkenoog <paul@v...> wrote:
> Hello Jason,
>
> > I was thinking of using firebird for my current web site which
uses
> > MySQL and is getting really hard to manage.
> >
> > I need to be able to work with the database during development on
my
> > Windows machine.
> >
> > I got firebird 1.5 RC2 I think... and latest version for FreeBSD
is
> > 1.0.2...
> >
> > Are the DB files completely compatible? Can I just upload the
> > database to my FreeBSD machine?
>
> Not completely, at least you must never assume that. But AFAIK, the
> ODS (On Disk Structure) hasn't changed from 1.0 -> 1.5
>
> But you should never copy the database file itself between OS'es, or
> between server versions. The official way to copy a database between
> two systems is:
>
> 1. Make a backup (.gbk/.fbk) on the source system, using the FB
tools
> on your source system.
> The backup file is universally exchangable, so:
> 2. Copy the backup to your target system. Restore the database on
the
> target system using your tools there. That should do it, provided
> that your database doesn't e.g. use UDF functions that aren't
> available on the target system, or uses extensions that were
> added in 1.5
>
> If your FreeBSD is always up and reachable from your Windows
machine,
> you'd better not move copies around all the time but work with the
> FreeBSD copy only. Just point the Windows client app to the FreeBSD
> server.
>
>
> HTH,
> Paul Vinkenoog