[ale] Backup frequency question

[William Fragakis]

Opinions requested from those wiser/smarter than me (which includes all
of you, your pets and probably your houseplants):

My wife's medical practice management software writes to a closed source
database*. Prior to Jan, the version of the database we used allowed for
"hot" backups - you could copy (we used rsync) the files to another
server while the database was in use. Thus, we could make hourly copies
as well as the usual nightly copy which was also sent off site. The
hourly copies were written to a duplicate machine so if the primary data
server failed in any catastrophic way, we'd have both the data and a
machine configured to serve it available quickly. Losing an hour's worth
of work seemed to be the level of risk we felt we could assume. We don't
feel comfortable losing a day's worth of work. Of course, the database
and the duplicate both use RAID 1, the primary server using Windows and
hardware (motherboard) RAID and the backup, Linux software RAID.

While the risk of losing both disks of a RAID are statistically low, I'm
freaky about both data preservation and availability.

Since Jan., an update in the database version prevents us from making
live copies (we either have to kick off all the users or ignore file
locking, both not what you want for obvious reasons). We can still make
nightly backups but we are "naked" (at least it feels that way) for the
next 24 hours.

Ideally, we'd just migrate to an open source solution but, invariably,
it's not that easy (or at least quick). 

In the meantime, am I being overly paranoid or should I be concerned? Of
course, the vendor is telling me that I'm worrying over something that
has a low probability and at this point has no plans to add a utility to
the management program to allow live copies - which they could do but
won't. I can't do it directly because they won't give us the level of
access to the database we need to do it ourselves. Thoughts?

TIA,
William

*Advantage Database ver. 8.1