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We are considering moving our systems to GCE and trying to figure the best approach to backup our many firebird databases.

Firebird is not VSS aware so we can't use shadow copying. On our current host, we create backups of every single database with gbak daily - which consumes a lot of time and disk. We would like to improve that.

Would the following procedure be enough to guarantee a safe differential backup? We are on windows :

  1. connect to all databases and set them to backup mode (or offline mode)
  2. stop the firebird service
  3. unmount the drive containing the dbs
  4. create a snapshot with gcloud
  5. remount, restart service, put dbs online
RudiBR
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  • Maybe incremental multi-level backups using `nbackup` utility would be suffice – Arioch 'The Sep 26 '17 at 08:30
  • Actually, step 1 is redundant. What you need is shutting down all the firebird server services (would flush FB caches) and then flushing disk caches (should be done when unmounting). – Arioch 'The Sep 26 '17 at 08:32

1 Answers1

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Your steps should be feasible and implementable. However, I suggest before doing migration make a couple of tests and create a backup and restore plan based on your needs. You can find more information about Creating a Windows Persistent Disk Snapshot on this article. Also I recommend visiting Best Practices for Enterprise Organizations and Launch Checklist for Google Cloud Platform documentations. This is another document, although it is not Firebird, but you may find some good information about Databases Disaster Recovery Plan with Compute Engine.

Kamran
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