At 10:31 07/24/03, Alexander wrote:

>--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Scott Taylor <scott@d...>
>wrote:
> > Yeah, maybe a switch in gbak to choose to allow to continue on data
> > errors. Sometimes any recovery is better than none, especially
>after a
> > disaster. I always have multiple copies, multiple locations, daily,
>of the
> > live database. Therefore, if I could at least get a partial
>recovery of
> > the most current data, then I might be able to piece together the
>rest.
>
> Scott, .gbk can be unrestorable not only due to our efforts, but to
>be secondary due to corruptions provided by power failures etc.

That's why I have so many backups.

>Sometimes, when such a annoyance occures in time when server
>intesively collects garbage, some debris of records to be finally
>cleared remains in the state of live record. Usually they are filled
>with nulls and common queries which use indices just don't see them.



>gbak is another best, when backung up he scans all in natural order
>and writes all, if he will perform serious checks we have low chances
>to wait until he finishes. But on restore checks are performed (it is
>much less cost for it in this time), and we can get the same effect.

Makes sense to just backup everything with out checking. That's obvious.

Still the problem exists, when there is a bad record I still think it would
be best to let the DBA attempt to recover as much as possible. Errors
could be dumped to a separate file in the form of ASCII text if possible.

<snip>

> In general I agree with you, but think improvements of current gbak
>should be more complex

I'm sure, like I said earlier, I'm not a developer. ;)

> To reassure those whose legs trembles reading this: if you keep
>common rules of computer hygiene, corruption is very seldom visitor. I
>encountered it less than 10 times since 1995 when I started with IB4
>on SCO and no one since I migrated to FB1.

FB1 would be very handy on SCO, do you have the binaries? I can't get it
to compile on SCO.

> Neverthelles, my night cron
>perform backup without garbage collection and than in parallel sweep
>and statiscic calculation on the main database and copy of .gbk and
>restore on developer's server to be sure in new day.

:)

What is the proper command to use to perform a backup without garbage
collection? I thought that was a restore function. Grr...

Scott.