Hi

> 1. Shadow Copies only applies to shares.

I use NTBACKUP with its valume shadow copy feature. I think it is the same.
If it IS NOT the same, ignore the rest of my mail.

For me, shadow copies do the following: As soon, as an shadow copy is
activated on a drive / folder, all running processes can continue working
with these files, without any notice. But the process that created the
shadow copy, seens his own snapshot of these files as they were in the very
moment, when the shadow copy was created. Similar to what a program would
see, after there was a power failure.

So, the backup programm can copy and store the files including the database
files, without any further modifications (these only occur on the real file
outside the shadow copy). Now, since firebird can handle power failures
(because of its carefull write strategies), it should be no problem at all
to handle these copied files as well.

Furthermore, the server is not being disturbed, since there is no lock on
the real database file at all.

What's wrong on this?
If everything above is true, NTBACKUP is a good (and fast) way to backup
firebird databases. (On Windows 2003 only, since other dialects still leck
this feature)

Regards,
Steffen