backup zip problem?

My database is quite large, well over 4 GB. I thought the purpose of zipping it was to make it smaller, but when I tried to back it up to DropBox using File…Export…Database Archive, although it said it was making a zip file, the file it’s exporting is the same size as the original–and it’s now 12 hours later, and DropBox is claiming it still has eight hours to go on the sync! Is this normal?
historydoll (now DOCTOR historydoll :mrgreen: : Ph.D done, in part thanks to DTPO!)

Can’t help you with the backup problem, but congrats on your doctorate!

The size of the zip depends on the compressabilty of the thing being zipped. Do you have lots of images in your database? Image zips might be as large as the original.

And, also congratulations, Doctor. :slight_smile:

I’d suggest that you not send the backup archive to DropBox, which will treat it as a big new file that has to be copid in its entirety. Depending on your ISP, your upload speed to the Internet is probably a small fraction of the speed you would achieve by saving the backup archive to a local external drive.

I prefer having my important backups under my control, anyway. Suppose your hard drive were to crash, and you replace it with a new drive. You wouldn’t have immediate access to your databases (and backups) stored in the cloud, as it would take a long time to download them to the new drive. Even a cheap USB drive would give you much faster access to your files. I store my backup archives on a portable FireWire drive and in turn store a clone of that drive at my bank’s safety deposit box.

Thanks for all the congratulations! :smiley: DTPO was an enormous help on many many levels, from organizing research to collecting info on formatting.

I do have images, korm, but not that many: 57 out of a few thousand docs. So that’s not the answer on the zipping, unfortunately; still looking for an answer if anyone has one.

Bill, you are right, of course, and I do that. The main copy of the db is on my internal hard drive, which is a) set up with Time Machine and b) cloned on a weekly basis rotating between two separate external hard drives. There’s a copy of the db on a flash drive as well. (Ditto for the dissertation; I tend to the extremely relaxed in most of my ways, but backup is one place where I become truly obsessive!). I just had an idle thought about putting it on DropBox, which I’ve done occasionally before, when it was smaller. It took time, but it’s never taken 24 hours before. I still wonder about the size of the zipped file, but it’s not really important, as your point about recovering from DropBox is exactly right, and something I had not thought of. Thanks!