We are in the process of upgrading our app from using FB 2.0.1 to FB 2.5, and 
have a just a few users beta testing that.
 

 I have a DB from a user of that beta version of our software, that has been 
opened successfully in our app using FB 2.5, and that seems to behave 
successfully in the app. It can be backed up successfully with gbak, but if we 
try to restore it with gbak, we get:
 

 gbak: ERROR:Malformed string
gbak: ERROR:Invalid data detected. Use -FIX_FSS_DATA option.
gbak:Exiting before completion due to errors
 

 I've Googled a lot about this and that -FIX_FSS_DATA option seems to only 
really be relevant when restoring DBs from much earlier versions of FB - but 
this is from the same version! Also, I tried adding that option to the gbak 
restore command line, and the result is the same failure.
 

 I did get the impression it could be about data types, perhaps particularly in 
BLOB fields. So I narrowed it down to the BLOB fields in our DB, and it turned 
out that there was one value in in field (type BLOB SUB_TYPE TEXT) in one row 
of the DB, that if I cut the value out in our UI, saved the row, then pasted 
the same value back in again in our UI, and saved the row again, the problem 
goes away - a backup made after that can be restored!
 

 I cannot see anything funny in the value - it's just some text, with a couple 
of embedded CR/LF pairs in it.
 

 This is obviously extremely worrisome, because we are not aware of any 
previous user when we used FB 2.0.1 that ever could not restore a backup. It is 
not good if we are providing software where in some cases, backups users make 
cannot be restored! And we don't even know how to detect such a problem, since 
there didn't appear to be anything wrong with the text in that problem field.
 

 Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks.
 

  • [firebird-support... dco...@sympatico.ca [firebird-support]

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