> > Win2003 has a disk shadow/mirror option which operates on
> shares declared
> on the disk - remove this option/property on the disk properties sheet.
>
> Strongly disagree.
> Never understood that advice. I am running Windows 2003 Servers with disk
> volume shadowing enabled and it IS a good feature, even for backing up
> firebird fdb files. Can anyone please try to explain this?
>

There are 2 issues here.
1. Shadow Copies only applies to shares. If your DB is not in a shared
hierarchy, then shadowing will not touch your DB
2. Shadow Copying is set to copy a live database. It activates when the file
is accessed i.e. live. This is never a good idea, it can (often) corrupt
your original since when you access it and write to it, the shadowing will
also start copying and lock sectors while the DB server is writing. If it
hasn't yet caused corruption, it will just wait for it. In your development
environment, you may not strike a problem for some time since you make a
connection to your dev db and perhaps wait some time before hitting it, but
in production, users aren't so patient. They start the app and go for it. If
it's alarge database, the problem will show itsef much sooner, since the
time taken to copy will grow longer and make more of a chance to crete
corruption.
It might look nice but it is the same as if you were manually copying a GDB
file while you had 50 users reading and writing to it. This doesn't work.
Alan