Backing up empty extents

[darth_pro]

We currently have a Unix server which has a Progress 7.3 database on it. The database is shutdown and backed up on a weekly basis.
Recently I have found out from the systems support team that the database takes along time to back up due to it having to backup even the empty extents, which are backed up as if they were full.
I understand that the database is allocated a certain amount of space through one or more extents which in their elementary sense are disk files sitting in a filesystem but if an extent is empty and is being backed up surely there are no blocks to send to the tape drive?
Is an empty extent purely just space in the filesystem reserved/allocated to a database not a full block of data bytes?

I'd be grateful for any help on this matter.

 

[toby.Harman]

Couple of things

1. Upgrade! 7.3 is now unsupported and generally buggy and out of date! I suspect that there is some good reason you cannot, but v7 generally had more bugs than Windows :awink: so an upgrade would be an idea.

2. How are you doing the backups? tar/cpio/dd of the filesystem/directories? In which case you are backing up the empty extents. Probkup - no, you are not backing up the empty extents. It will stop at the database high-water mark.

To solve this problem, allocate some extra disks and probkup the database to the disks (probkup <dbname> <directory/dbname.bak> -com to get you going though if the db is more than 2GB this may have a problem!), and then backup the filesystem/directory. This way you can use your fancy tape handler/backup software/whatever that is Progress Unaware to backup your Progress database

Hope this helps!