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            GBAK

            Created by Russ Hartle, Modified on Tue, 11 Nov, 2025 at 10:27 AM by Russ Hartle

            GBAK — Firebird Backup and Restore

            GBAK is Firebird’s command line tool for online backup and restore of a complete database.

            GBAK is able to perform a backup while the database is running. There is no need to shut down the database during a GBAK backup. GBAK will create a consistent snapshot of the database at the time it starts running. You will, however, notice a perfomance degradation during the backup, so it is a good idea to backup at night. As GBAK visits all pages of the database, it will also perform a garbage collection on the database.

            You can find the official Firebird GBAK documentation here.

            How Backup works

            GBAK will create a consistent snapshot (or dump) of a database. This snapshot/dump will contain the contents of the database of the point in time when the backup is started. For that, it will create an (one) isolated transaction that is used to read the entire database and write it to the snapshot/dump file (which ususally has the .fbk filename extension).

            During the backup, the database can be used regularly. All transactions that run after the backup has started, will be separated from the backup. Depending on the size of the database, the duration of the backup and the number and duration of parallel transactions, this can more or less reduce the performance of the database while the backup is running (remember that Firebird has to handle all the data so that new data is isolated from the currently running backup). But it will work and after the backup is finished (the transaction is committed), the database will come back to its usual performance.

            General Syntax

            gbak <options> -user <username> -password <password> <source> <destination>

            Backup

            For backups, <source> is the database (= database string) you want to back up, <destination> is the path and file name of the backup file. The usual extension for the backup file is .fbk for Firebird and .gbk for InterBase.

            Only SYSDBA or the database owner can perform a backup. For multi-file databases, specify only the name of the first file as the database name.

            Restore

            For restores,

            is the backup path file name and is the name of the database (= database string) that is to be built up from the backup file. You will have to specify the -C option for restore.

            General Options

            Tables can't be imported directly. Please insert an image of your table which can be found here.

            Backup Options

            Tables can't be imported directly. Please insert an image of your table which can be found here.

            Restore Options

            Tables can't be imported directly. Please insert an image of your table which can be found here.

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