it allways said that the purpose of backups is a disaster recover. It
is not said that maybe someone wants simply to get back only a record
deleted or modified.
It is said that backups should be done at night, without user or with
locks. What happen if you backup at 00:00 and your database crash at
18:00? Your backup is 100% consistent but you have lost thousand of records.
In my opinion it is better to backup frequently, with users (who are not
there in the night) and without locks (that you can add, if you want, in
the night).

waiting to be shot down

marco

Depends on what you are trying to accomplish I guess. Doing "backups" with
operations ongoing is going to have a tendency to interfere with operations. But
you can create an audit trail while operations are ongoing and it can be used to
recover if there is a problem (so long as the problem does not effect the audit
trail adversely too.

Check out our AutoArchive product (link in my signature) for one canned approach
to creating an audit trail. It can be set to a number of different granularites
of audit but the basics are that whenever a change is made to a record a copy is
made of the record and stored in a separate table in a different alias
(preferably on a second server for greater data safety) so you have the whole
edit history and not just the current state of the record.

Denn Santoro
President
Resource Development Associates
http://www.RDAWorldWide.Com
Offices in the United States and Germany
Providing solutions to health care, business, governments and non-profits since
1982