>No, not particularly. What is the exact command line you are passing
>to gbak?
> What do you mean by 'slow'?

It was taking 15 to 20 minutes rather than the 2-3 minutes taken by
superserver. You have solved this for me though. I was using IBExpert
to do the backup so I went straight to GBak to find out what command
line would correspond to what IBExpert was doing. When I ran GBAK on
its own it was much faster. It seems that IBExpert is causing the
slowdown. Its batch files from now on!

> Garbage collection, try using -g option to see if that is your problem.

This made little difference

> If I am right about garbage collection, then the SS backup wont have
> as much garbage to worry about because CS cleaned it up earlier.

The thing is that this server has been used for a year with
superserver and I have only recently changed it to classic server. I
have also tried this with a freshly restored DB so there should be
little/no garbage.

Thanks for your help.
Will.