7.1. Backup

Firebird comes with two utilities for backing up and restoring your databases: gbak and nbackup. Both can be found in the bin subdirectory of your Firebird installation. Firebird databases can be backed up while users are connected to the system and going about their normal work. The backup will be taken from a snapshot of the database at the time the backup began.

Regular backups and occasional restores should be a scheduled part of your database management activity.

Except in nbackup’s lock mode, do not use external proprietary backup utilities or file-copying tools such as WinZip, tar, copy, xcopy, etc., on a database which is running. Not only will the backup be unreliable, but the disk-level blocking used by these tools can corrupt a running database.

Study the warnings in the next section about database activity during restores!

More information about gbak can be found here (HTML and PDF version, same content):

https://www.firebirdsql.org/file/documentation/html/en/firebirddocs/gbak/firebird-gbak.html
https://www.firebirdsql.org/file/documentation/pdf/en/firebirddocs/gbak/firebird-gbak.pdf

The nbackup manual is here (again same content in HTML and PDF):

https://www.firebirdsql.org/file/documentation/html/en/firebirddocs/nbackup/firebird-nbackup.html
https://www.firebirdsql.org/file/documentation/pdf/en/firebirddocs/nbackup/firebird-nbackup.pdf