I understand that filemaker server can do complete database backups and incremental backups, I can't seem to find anywhere to tell it in the scheduling backup section what type of backup i want it to do, anyone know off hand?

FMS can do backups of all the hosted files, specific files, or a folder of files. They are full file backups.

Ypu can select the file or files to be backed up, along with the frequency. Each backup is complete however. It is [color:red]not just a back up of changed values.

You can also make backups to different directories of the same file staggered over time so that you have a running series of backups that do not overwrite one another. In fact, that is what you likely should do.

Steven

Thank you both for the responses, I am very new to filemaker and the help I get in this forum is excellent, makes learning the program a whole lot less of a kick in the shin. Staggering the backups into different folders is a great idea as i have 6 co-workers entering data all day long, thanks for that Steven, great tip.

Yes and you should also save your nightly backup process into different day folders so that you can always go back up to 6 days immediately without having to go to your External backup archives.

BTW, I was curious to see where you got the idea that FMS does incremental backups and after some research, I believe you got that information from pg. 129 of the fms9 help file.

The paragraph you were referring to was talking about the External backup process; not the FMS backup process. I believe you missed the part where it referred to the "enterprise backup system".

To clarify, the recommendation was to perform your FileMaker Server backups, and then nightly you can make incremental backups of the SERVER (sans any actively hosted FM files) with an application such as Retrospect, Tivoli, etc. Those commercial applications allow for incremental backups. Then at the end of the week, they were recommending that you do a FULL system backup of the server in the same manner.