I would like to help you. But my experience with RAID is rather limited. This is second hand information.

Redundent Array of Independent Disks.

You can use hardware or software RAID. Both will write to several hard drives at once. This means if one hard drive dies, there is another hard drive that can continue working. I have heard that you can "freeze" a hard drive so you can perform a backup with data that is all "in sync"

I will tell you what we do when we need to make a backup when people have work to do. We kick everyone out of the system. We copy all the data to a temporary directory. We allow everyone back into the system and we run the backup on the copy of the data in the temporary directory.

So we do have to kick people out for a period, but it is a shorter period of time than it takes to do the tape backup because we are copying hard drive to hard drive. This may not be a viable solution in your situation though.

Anyone have better or more RAID information to share?

Joe

>Hello Joseph,
>
> Thanks for your responce. Yes you are right, there are problems if i copy file A and B.
>
> Can u explain me about RAID/Backup.
>
>Regards
>Amit
>
>>You want to be careful backing-up when people are using files. If a user is making a change that affects several files, you can get data that is out-of-sync.
>>
>>For example, copying starts, file A is copied. Procedure is performed that changes file A and file B. File B is copied. You now have a backup with file A missing information that should link to information in file B.
>>
>>I would look at RAID/backup solutions maybe if you need to backup while users are working.
>>
>>Joe
>>
>>>Hi All,
>>>
>>> I want to create a backup program using timer event. The program is to take the full volumn backup to the other volumn after every Hour. How can i do that. Can i use RUN xcopy '\\server\volumn'
>>>command? or is there any other way to take backup of the files/volumns thru vfp and also the faster and safer.
>>>
>>> And also if i use xcopy command, will it slow downs the server. and second main will it lock the files or not. means when doing xcopy other users will get disturb or not.
>>>
>>>TIA
>>>
>>>Amit