On 6/11/2004 at 12:12 AM R. S. Patil wrote:

> Dear Friends,
>
> Setup Is as Follows.
>
> A Small LAN with i386 Based IBM server P4, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB Disk
> Suse 8.2 Pro, FB 1.5 RC8, SMBA Server for NT emulation, 10 Win 98 Clients
> Database Size about 290 MB, Running a Vital Banking C/S Application
> written
> in Delphi 5 with IBO for data manipulation & IBX components for
> Backup/Restore.
>
> This is what happened.
>
> The user, as a monthly routine advised by us, tried backup/restore cycle,
> Which is
> hardcoded in Program. Since partition where .gbk is usually created got
> out
> of
> disk space for some or the other reason, and a partial .gbk was created
> without any
> exception or error message. Since no exceptions or error messages Program
> went
> ahead and tried to restore the partial .gbk and corrupted the original
> database.
>
> Since there was tape backup of original gdb we have survived.
>
> Can somebody guide me how shall I take precaution in the program itself
> so that it will detect similar situation of partial backup for some or the
> other reason and stop there itself before restoring such partial .gbk ?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Best Regards
>
> R. S. Patil
>

First off, I would suggest that you never, ever, restore on top of an existing database. Create a copy, make sure the copy is good, and then you can rename the files as needed if you wish to run using the new clean copy.

Disks are so cheap now there is little reason why, especially for a "vital banking application", that the client shouldn't be able to purchase an additional hard drive and dedicate that drive to database files, thus avoiding the problem of running out of space due to other happenings on the server.

The one and only time in the past year since I started using Firebird that I have corrupted a Firebird database was when the disk ran out of space. This was not during a backup, but during normal operation.

HTH,

Dan.