Leyne, Sean wrote:

> 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??
>

Yep. It creates a live database in read-only mode. Each increment
creates the next file in a multi-file database. So they are chained
together. Once they are chained together, the full path is part of that
chain. To use the back up, you change the database from read-only to
read-write. Very cool for disaster recovery by the way. Especially if
you could get it to write the file(s) to a remote server. This way you
could create your shawdows on the hour or something similar to cut down
on network traffic to the remote server. If disaster hits, just change
some IP address on the router, change the DB to read-write, and your
customer is back up and running. Realize for our needs this would be a
server in a different city. If there is a flood in Texas, we want the
back up server in Philadelphia.

>
>> 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)
>
>
>

The "indian" is different between Linux and Windows. Right? Those are
the two platforms I need to work with most often.

>> 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
>
>
>
>