> > 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.

I've never heard of NTBACKUP - if it's not a third party product, then it's
not called anything special on my Server2003 box.
I have Disk Shadow as a property of the Disk (right click on the disk drive
in Explorer and select Properties, then the Shadow tab).
And I also have a system tool called merely "Backup" which I never use.

>
> 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.

I'm not sure I understand you but you appear to be confirming what I have
said. i.e. running processes continue while the copying is taking place.
This is the problem to which I refer.

>
> 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.

The file in total is not locked but disk sector by disk sector it IS locked
while copying, this is an OS thing which will not change.

I think you might be confusing other things with regard to power failure and
the forced writes property.

Alan