We seem to be unable to get sever to back up to a remote disk. We continue to end up with an Invalid file path no matter what we try.

Is it not possible to back up to a remote disk via one of server's back up routines...or do we need a third party application?

What platform are you running your server on and what type of remote disk are you using?

Daniel

Do a search in the FM Knowledge base (www.filemaker.com/kb). FMI does not support backing up directly to a remote volume.

And for good reasons:

- your back-up will take a lot longer

- if it fails (which is infinitely more likely than backing up locally) you will not have a valid backup.

See the "Backups! More Backups" article on www.connectingdata.com for an approach that will give you unlimited date/time stamped backup sets both locally and remotely with just a few schedules.

Edited October 14, 200619 yr by Guest

Hey Wim,

I'm not finding that article offered on your web site, but I'd be very curious to see it.

thx

PS. In answer to Dan's question, we are running our servers on OS X machines and want to back up to iDisk. But we're open to other options.

We just need to be offering our clients offsite backups in the event of fire or flood. Ideally we would like to eventually backup client data to machines in our own offices. (All mac based.)

http://www.connectingdata.com/downloads.htm for the article http://www.connectingdata.com/MoreBackups_v2.pdf

The idisk business is neither supported, nor a good idea. When you review the article, it will explain why. The gist of the backup process:

1. Backup locally to the FMS Server.

2. Push that backup out to another location.

3. Backup that copy (the one pushed out).

Steven

I use the idisk business because I need to be able to access the files at home - so I have an idisk at work and it syncs so that I have the same version of the files at home.

I have done it this way because no other solution seems to do what I need - do I understand you to be saying that filemaker doesn't support this and that its not a good idea?

why is that?

Why it's not a good idea is described earlier in the thread:

- it takes longer

- it is infinitely more likely to fail and leave you without a good backup

Backup locally and then use the OS to zip and push the backup to a remove volume.

I back up locally as well.

Its a pain carting the files back and forth when I may not need them

Not sure what you mean by "carting them around". You can use a batch file or VBscript to do the zipping and copying to a remote share. You can schedule the OS script through the FMS scheduler or the regular Windows scheduler.

Same on the Mac.

this is going to expose my ignorance: my research suggested that vbscript wasn't available on the mac

and I don't get the apple script thing (yet)

On the Mac you can use that apple-scripting but you can also use Unix shell scripts.