Thank you for your extensive reply. For backups I guess the webhost will be
providing some sort of assurance, but this is a website where I will not
want to come into the picture once the site is hosted. So if at all the DB
goes down I was looking at automated procedures to restore it from backed up
files.

At the moment the solution I thought of was to dump the contents of the DB
into a file, and have it uploaded to a different location (different
server). I could (I think & I hope)easily write a PHP script that will exec
the DB dumping command, and once the file is backed up, say after 5 seconds,
I continue by opening a network socket, or better still a FTP connection to
this other server, and upload the backup file. I guess we could look at some
partly redundant solutions here, like overwriting a backup file that is
older than a week etc. (i.e. all backups will be maintained for atleast a
week, and this script will run daily, I was thinking a CRON job here).

Now let's say that the webhost is not able to restore the DB from backups, I
can physically go and execute a restore script which would connect to the
remote backup server and download the backup file, and once its integrity is
verified, I was thinking of CRC32 (appended when uploading the file) and
populate the DB with this backed up data.


Now ofcourse this all sounds good in theory, but I can think of many weak
links in the chain, like the FTP connection being refused due to the other
server being down / network congestion etc. This brings up another issue::
"Can I set up a cron job from PHP?"

Now coming back to why I'm planning to use a VB front-end to the DB, it
really is an interesting story. This website is for a monastery, and the
monks live in this remote location, where there is no ISP. They do have a
telephone line though. To connect to the internet they have to call long
distance, so to minimise the cost, a VB front-end would store all the
changes they want to make, connect to the internet and do the updation in a
single stroke. Now the cost of development is not really a botheration here,
as we are looking at volunteer help.

Now why do monks in the middle of nowhere need a website? That my friend is
another story.

-Srini


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