Obviously you don't know anything about Progress. Don't get mad at us but the purpose of this forum is not to provide basic education to people. I would strongly recommend you to follow the link that Cringer posted to get somewhat familiar with the product in the first place. Why do I say that: You don't have revealed anything about the system you are supposed to administer - therefore we could very well talk about a system that handles thousands of users, Terra bytes of data and millions of transactions per hour which must be available 24x7.
Therefore you need to find out
- The installation directory of Progress/OpenEdge: It should contain a file named sports2000.db or startup.pf - search for that files on your file systems and you will find the directory.
- The installation directory contains a bin directory in which you will find the proenv script which sets the necessary environment variables and extends the PATH so that the shell will find the executables.
- Where the databases reside, which scripts are used to start and stop them.
- Whether a disaster recovery strategy is already in place and which scripts are used for it.
- Enhance/replace the disaster recovery strategy if you find it is not in line with the business requirement.
Creating a backup of a database, although one of the most important, is only part of a disaster recovery strategy. There you will find the "probkup" helpful and I think you won't find anybody in this forum advising against the usage of "probkup" in favor of OS copies.
Having said all that, I cannot emphasize enough that you either need to get the skills in self-study or better yet, get a training in order to successfully administer the database(s). If you, or probably your managers, don't find that necessary then I suppose that there must not be data of any value in your system.
Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.