> Besides that, is there any other advantage of gbak or nbackup > against an ordinary copy of the database?
When a GBAK backup finishes successfully you know that your database is physically intact. When a restore finishes successfully you also know that your database is logically intact (consistent). As you mentioned, running a GBAK or NBACKUP backup doesn't require you to shutdown the database. You may find some time to do that now but maybe in a few years your users won't be happy anymore that there is a service outage once a day. A GBAK backup does a garbage collection on the database (unless you use the -g switch). Best Regards Stefan
