Tom,

> With the new IB 2007 incremental back up, it really does incremental
> shadowing. Useful in many cases, but as a pure backup and archival
> system, not that good. The directory structure must be exactly the

same

> when you try to use the "backup" on another machine.

Are you sure about that??

> I understand the
> limitation of nbackup requiring the same operating system type and DB
> Engine version. I would love to see the operating system requirement
> fixed, but that is for another day.

To be clear, the OS requirement is only an extension of the overall
limitations of moving a database to a platform with the same endian
alignment.

Thus, you can move the database (and backups) from Win2000 to Win2003 to
Linux on x86 without problems. But you can't move from x86 to SPARC (as
an example -- not sure if SPARC has different endian alignment)

> My question is the directory structure. If I where to take a weeks
> worth of incremental backups (with the full backup), zip them up and
> stick them out on some archival drive, when I come back to restore the
> db, so I have to put them in the exact same file / folder structure.

Not at all true with nbackup.

> Let say server A has a /fbdata directory and server B has a
> /opt/firebird/database directory. Any problems for seen with backing
> up on server A and then restoring on server B?

Absolutely none.


Sean