> There are several answers to this. The first is probably the obvious -
> if the data is critical, the the machine it is running on would be using
> a RAID disk, so allowing 'hot' handling of live data. The second option
> is 'replication', where there is more than one set of hardware, each
> maintaining a live copy of the data.
>
> Firebird supports an internal SHADOW facility which will allow it to
> maintain two local copies of the data, and the second copy can be
> accessed should the first become corrupt. This should be viewed as a
> secondary method of 'backup', depending on the level of availability
> required.
>

Lester - I think this is misleading. Shadows are only good when there has
been a hardware failure on one disk. In the event of corruption on one copy,
the shadow mechanism is MOST likely to provide two databases with corruption
since it is mirroring the disk writes to two places.
Alan