Hello, André!

Thursday, April 11, 2013, 2:42:01 PM, you wrote:

>> How does this compare with the experience of others?

AK> Hmmm. A quick calculation shows:
AK> My biggest database is 1/74 of the size of yours.
AK> I need ~5 Minutes to backup a freshly restored database, backup takes
AK> longer if the restore is longer ago (up to 6.5 minutes).

too slow. at my old desktop with Athlon 64 x2 5200 and 3 SATA II drives
backup of 2.7GB database from one drive to another took from 3.5 to 5
minutes, depending on protocol used.
The fastest way to do backup is to use Services API,
i.e. -se option of gbak. And, to use -g option of course.

So, with worst 5 minutes result, 74/2.7 = 2 hours and 17 minutes.

And, with the a bit modern hardware (but still desktop with several
drives)
restore of another database, 1.5GB backup size and 3.9gb
resulting database also takes not more than 5 minutes,
via -se.
But, via localhost - around 1 hour.

--
Dmitry Kuzmenko, www.ib-aid.com