Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 7/6/2019 10:02 AM, "Jeff-Relf.Me@."@ wrote:
AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx\place s.sqlite
Read timed out.
The customer leaves Firefox running 24/7

A backup using Cobian to a local FTP server that normally
takes 20 minutes was taking over 24 hours.

I always close Firefox before backing up my Profile;
I "RoboCopy" backup my entire profile,
and select files are uploaded to my FTP server.

Unless you close Firefox, before backing up the profile, there will be
files that are missed. To truly back up your entire profile you must
close Firefox before starting the back up, so all of the files that
Firefox uses are closed when you start the back up.

You can verify this fact by going into the prifile, sorting by file
date, opening Firefox, doing something and close it. You can see the
file times closing to the current time.

Unless you continuously backup each and every changed file, by
definition "there will be files that are missed" between subsequent
backups.

The point in this case is, whether backing up a running instance of
Firefox will result in data corruption/loss at restore, which is *worse*
than the inherent loss of data due to the interval between backups. For
a *webbrowser*, I find that hard to believe.

So yes, there will be data loss because of the backup interval, but I
strongly doubt that there will be more data loss if Firefox isn't
shutdown during the backup.

Out of interest: Do you shutdown Thunderbird during backup? And what
about any other programs which use some kind of (pseudo) database behind
the scenes?

FYI, I run a local/private newsserver (Hamster) which (of course) also
uses a database. I do not shut it down during backups for the reason
given above.

BTW, if you use a real, transaction oriented, database and cannot
permit to lose any transactions, it's of course a whole different ball
game with the need for fail-safe transaction logging, rollback, etc.,
but that's not the scenario we're discussing here.