Ann,

A> Another day when I should have stayed in bed. Ivan is completely
A> right. As long as there is no concurrent writing going on the
A> copy is safe.

this is exactly the problem. Can you guarantee that there is no
concurrent writing? You wrote "If you can shut off updates for the
duration of the copy, you'll be ok.". What about the garbage
collection thread? I think the OP would be well advised to use the
safe tools (gbak, nbackup) that exist.

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
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