Firebird GBAK is a powerful command-line tool, included in every Firebird distribution, it is one of the most frequently used, and often Firebird developers and administrators use it ineffectively or in a non-secure way.
The article "Firebird Gbak Tips And Tricks" walks through the simplest gbak commands to the advanced options. It is written with the idea to answer the typical questions from Firebird users and provide ready-to-use optimized commands to perform backup and restore. 
 

A new version of the Firebird PHP driver is available. This version supports boolean support. Precompiled binaries for PHP 7.3 and 7.4 are available at the download section.

The driver is marked as 1.1.0-beta, so please test it on development stages. Please report any problems to the tracker at https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/php-firebird/issues.

Jaybird 4.0.1 has been released. Jaybird 4.0.1 is the first maintenance release of Jaybird 4, and introduces support for INT128 (a new type in Firebird 4), improves support for the Firebird 4 WITH TIME ZONE types by adding support for java.time.ZonedDateTime and making some of the derivation rules more consistent with Firebird. It also provides some bug fixes and other changes.

The following has been changed or fixed since Jaybird 4.0.0

• Fixed: Changes to the transaction configuration (transaction parameter buffer configuration) of one connection are no longer propagated to other connections with the same connection properties (JDBC-386)
• Fixed: Search index of Javadoc in Java 11 version used incorrect links (JDBC-619)
• Fixed: The cleanup of native resources didn't dispose the native library held by JNA, as a change in implementation no longer allowed directly access to the JNA NativeLibrary (JDBC-620)
• Fixed: When updating a row through an updatable result set, selected but not updated blob fields were set to NULL (JDBC-623)
• Added: Support for type INT128 (reported as JDBC type NUMERIC) (JDBC-624)
  See also Firebird 4 INT128 support.
• Added: A static utility method FBDriver.normalizeProperties which, given a JDBC url and a Properties object, returns a Map containing the merged properties normalized to common property name. (JDBC-627)
• Fixed: Use of isc_dpb_no_db_triggers no longer logs a warning (JDBC-628)
• Incompatible change: While making changes to time zone support, the API of org.firebirdsql.gds.ng.tz.TimeZoneDatatypeCoder was made almost entirely private. This should not affect normal user code.
  Although we try to avoid these types of incompatible changes in point releases, we explicitly allow them for the org.firebirdsql.gds.ng package and sub-packages.
• Changed: conversions from TIME WITH TIME ZONE now use 2020-01-01 as base date for named zones (JDBC-629)
• New feature: Added support for java.time.ZonedDateTime for the WITH TIME ZONE types (JDBC-630)
• Fixed: Connection.setNetworkTimeout incorrectly used the provided Executor to set the timeout (JDBC-631)

Jaybird 4 supports Firebird 2.5 and higher, on Java 7, 8, 11 and 14 (using the Java 11 version of the driver).