>
> hope you checked this out before you re-invented the wheel
> http://www.is.svitonline.com/ddking/

I hardly call 10 LOC reinventing a wheel ;)

No, but I did try out a similar program in one of the Firebird admin
tools linked from the main website. Most of these tools do something
slightly different to what I require. I didn't think it worth telling
the whole story.

Basically there are two sets of databases on the server, real ones
and others. Others include databases used for product demonstrations,
product trials, testing etc and we have no interest in backing them
up. They all live in a particular folder with something obvious like

c:\NotBackedUp\.....

Aliases are used to reference the database to keep things simple. For
example, if a trial customer decides to buy, then we can simply move
their database to the real data folder and change their alias.

But basically I do not trust the implementation team to remember to
add a database to a backup schedule. The risk is just too high. With
this approach, any database you add that is in the data path will be
automatically included in the nightly backup.

While I could include them all, the database server is hosted in a
data centre offsite with a guaranteed uplink of 100Mbps, more then
enough to swamp our local ADSL, so I would prefer to keep the demo
and testing databases out of the backup.

Anyhow, I am not satisfied with the take a guess as to how long it
will take to backup approach. Unless someone else has any other idea
how I can say to Firebird "are you backing anything up at this
moment", then I will investigate checking at the file-system level
for locks on the fbk file. It might be worth throttling it to 1
backup at a time in any case so as to not kill I/O resources.

Adam