I’d really like to adopt LibreOffice with the embedded Firebird… but can find nothing on backup procedures. Hardly an “ad” for a serious database! Or maybe I’m just no good at searching.
I know I can do a variety of things… if I trust the software. I don’t. I’ve been using software generally since 1968.
In MySQL, there is the MySqldump command. It is a bit of a bear, but you can put the hard stuff in a batch file.
If you run that EVERYTHING I care about in the database you point it at is dumped into an UTF-8 file. You can read it with a text editor. Your data is there, in something like CSV format. The definitions of the tables are there… what the fields are, lengths, data tyopes, etc. Constraints. If, say, you have an Army personnel file with a name/serial number table, and a separate table with serial number/rank, you can put a constraint on the latter which won’t allow you to add a record with a serial number which isn’t present in the name/serial number table. And the existence of that constraint is there, in UTF-8, in the dump file.
So! What does Firebird offer for me? Is there at least a way to write the table specs and relationships (constraints) out to a file that can be read in a text editor? I can manage a report to “dump” the table’s data.
What backup does LO with Firebird offer as standard? (Apart from using OS tools to do a copy of the .odb file. I think you can see the unacceptable-to-me flaw in that “backup system”?) I DID TRY to RTFM… but if something so important is there, but hidden as well as it seems to me it is, it is another “strike” against something I really want to embrace. Have a look at my Open Office base tutorials page to see “where I’m coming from”, if wondering how serious I am.