I have a Firebird 1.5 classic dialect 1 database running on a 1GB RAM
Windows 2003 server with dual Xeon HT-enabled processors. The system
contains mirrored hard drives for the operating system, and the
database resides on three drives set up as a hardware raid-5 array.

Since mid-September, the database has steadily grown from 29.6GB
(restored size) to 33.5GB. During that same time frame, backups have
taken between 1.25 hours and 3.5 hours, while restores have taken
between 5 hours and 9 hours. The process starts at midnight every
night, and there are no other users or processes running on this
server during that time frame.

However, those times have not coincided with the growth of the
database. From one day to the next, there could be a swing of more
than an hour one way or the other, for either backup or restore.

I have just heard from someone else that they have a 25GB database
with average backup times of 15 minutes (!) and restore times of 1.5
hours (!!).

Of course he is running on Linux and I on Windows, but can there be
that much of a difference? Is there any way to speed up this process?
I am already running the restore using the FB embedded rather than
using the regular classic server, which increased restore times by
about 25%. I need more though.

tia,

Bob M..