At 05:30 PM 02-12-00 +1100, you wrote:

>Helen, you imply that GBAK is reliable. I would beg to differ, and
>recommend everyone thoroughly test their backup routines after any DDL
>changes to a database. Make SURE it works for you before relying on
>it to save you from disaster.

I agree with the practice of testing that a gbak -r regenerates a working
database, before using it to replace your live database.

>Somewhere in my 100,000+ lines of SQL there is something that causes
>GBAK to create consistently corrupt backups. (IB v5.6 and v6)
>
>I am not trying to cause a panic, it would seem that GBAK works for
>most people and databases. This is just a warning to test your
>backups. Of course this warning is superfluous, people always test
>their backup regimes dont they? ;-)

...and EVERYBODY actually does backups, of course ! ;-)

>I have been trying to create a demonstration of the problem to send to
>those that might be able to fix it, but so far no luck in pinning down
>the specific cause of the problem. At one point I thought I had found
>it (by moving one constraint definition up above a previous one), but
>that only partly fixed it for a greatly cutdown version. So I am
>still looking, when I find it (them?) I will pass it on to the gurus.

I know your metadata is both huge and complex but, if you could possibly
run your backup and restore with the -verbose option and pipe the output
(of the operations, not the metadata) to a file, we can look at it in
Firebird and see what is going on there.

>At the moment the only backups that I can rely upon are offline
>backups by a separate utility.

Please - others - DON'T take this as advice to use file-copy utilities to
back up your InterBase databases. It is definitely not
recommended. Restored file-copy backups are BY FAR the commonest source of
corruption in InterBase databases. To produce a reliably restorable
file-copy backup, the database, the server and ALL clients, including
SYSDBA, must be completely shut-down and dead.

GBAK bugs are rare - problems that occur with backups usually *arise* from
corrupted databases. There are several things that **can** go wrong and
put a problem beyond the reach of the tools but, fortunately, mostly they
don't. GBak and the other command-line tools can be expected to work
properly. It's just a pity that they are not more friendly to use.

Helen

All for Open and Open for All
InterBase Developer Initiative · http://www.interbase2000.org
_______________________________________________________