Hi Helen. Thanks again for your answer.

I know that you are a very experienced user (judging from
your many posts) and I now I'm just a starter to firebird
(two - three months experience means nothing). Yes I have
read the interbase op guide but also trying to find the
best interface for BCB (tested zeos, IBX ended up with ODBC)
and do the actual developement in a four months period.
Wasn't my choise but the other alternative given to me
was MS Access !!

I believe what you say that -replace is a bad
option but as I said in my post the application
will run in a place with users who don't now
what is a command prompt, a database or even speak English.
I'm not get paid for the application (I'm not complaining here)
and I wont be available all the times to support them.
I can instruct them, once a day to push a button to perform
a backup (online) which I keep depending on the day of the week
the month and the year.
But In case of emergency I can't figure out an automated way
to perform a safe restore. I have developed an app which first
check for users connected, if no-one is ,shuts
down the server, perform a backup, and restore (yes with replace)
from their last backup and take the database online again. I use
IBPP and BCB6. I couldn't use any of the ready tools out there
cause either are too complicated for my users, or in different
language. Thats way I keep asking about when gfix returns. I want
to be sure that the database is realy shutdown.

Just one more thing
You said "When you have a corrupt database, no-one is connected to
it"
Does this mean that if a database is corrupt you CANT connect?
Because during my development I had a case where after
a few DDL statements I had a strange problem:
I couldn't define a foreign key for a table (from what I remember
the message was that the table was in use) and only SYSDBA
was connected (and YES only one time).
gfix returned no error (with full validation) and I could connect
from my app to the database and work without no problem.
Shutting down - restarting or even backing up and restoring
didn't solve the problem (backup and restore worked fine).
No network - no connections - just me (SYSDBA) and firebird.
Was that a corrupted database or not? (I believe I have that
database somewhere if you are interested).

I recreated the database from my original script (I prefer
to write the DDL's that way) and then I was
able to define the foreign key with no problem.

I just want to point out that you can work with
no problem with a corrupted database for a long time (until it
crashes on your face ofcource). So how to test if the restored
backup is ok automated?

Thanks again
John