Rich Shepard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Mikey C wrote: > >> This might be a dumb question, but is taking a backup of a live database >> simply a matter of copying the file to a backup device/drive? > > Yes. It's a regular file to your OS. As a matter of fact, you can copy the > file to another name and open that other name to see the same tables and > data as with the original. That's how I keep a backup of the database I'm > developing. > >> And restoring it a matter of copying it back? > > Yes.
That is a dangerous way to back up a live database. If another process decides to write to the database while you're backing it up, you'll be backing up partially modified data, and you're also ignoring any possible journal file. Whey you restore, you'll find corrupt data in this case. You should either have your backup application open the database and do a BEGIN EXCLUSIVE; statement to ensure that no other processes can write to it while you're backing it up, or if you don't want to do that, you can use the command line shell and do: sqlite3 .dump database.db > database.sql and then back up database.sql. In this latter case, the shell ensures that the database is unchanged during the entire dump. To restore, you do something like this on Windows (I'm not a Windows expert so the command may need some fixing): del database.db type database.sql | sqlite3 database.db Derrell ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
