Hello Hugo,

> We have a POS applications with hundreds of clients and need some advice on how to backup.
> Each application has it's own Firebird database.
> Read about nbackup and thought that this could be a solution since the clients has low bandwidth.
>
> My first idea was to daily backup and begin with N=0 and count up the N each day. This would result in probably hundreds of files.
> Would this be an OK solution?

Incrementing the backup level above 2 or 3 usually doesn't make sense.

An nbackup scheme may look something like this:

- A full (level-0) nbackup every month
- A level-1 incremental nbackup every week
- A level-2 incremental nbackup every day
- Optionally: a level-3 incremental nbackup every hour

Of course this is just an example, but you get the general idea.

With the 4 levels in the example, any restore would involve at most 4 files.

You should probably also script a deletion scheme.

See also the nbackup guide, especially this page: http://www.firebirdsql.org/file/documentation/reference_manuals/user_manuals/html/nbackup-backups.html

> Is it possible to restore a database with 1000 of nbackup files?

Theoretically, yes. But you don't need that many levels. And you can't put that many file names on the command line.

> Is it possible to tell nbackup to read all files in a folder?

Not directly. If you want to nbackup multiple databases, you should write a shell script that calls nbackup within a loop, each time with a different database name.


Hope this helps,
Paul Vinkenoog