In the past, Gbak was the only way of making a database backup over the network. As Firebird News » Patch landed in Firebird 2.5.x and is now possible to use API to do remote backups/restores

 

suggests, it is now possible to use the service API for that. It would be great if IBO would offer a way to use this! My use case would be exporting the database on the client directly from the server while compressing it on the fly (client side), without it ever hitting the hard drive. It would suffice if IBO would take a stream to write to, which could implement the compression (e.g. Abbrevia's TBZCompressionStream); otherwise some OnData event.