It is recommended that you use the option to rename and restart the transaction log when backing up the consolidated database and remote database transaction logs. For the dbbackup utility, this is the -r option.

The figure below illustrates a database named consol.db, with a transaction log named consol.log in the same directory. For the sake of simplicity, this example assumes that the log is in the same directory as the database, although this would not generally be safe practice in a production environment. The directory is named c:\live.

A backup command line

The following command line backs up the database using the rename and restart option:

dbbackup -r -c "uid=DBA;pwd=sql" c:\archive

The connection string options would be different for each database.

Effects of the backup

If you back up the transaction log to a directory c:\archive using the rename and restart option, the Backup utility carries out the following tasks:

After several backups, the live directory contains a set of sequential transaction logs.

A Message Agent command line

You can run the Message Agent with access to these log files using the following command line:

dbremote -c "dbn=hq;..." c:\live