 The importance of point-in-time consistency can be illustrated with what would happen if a backup were made without it.Assume Wikipedia's database is a huge file, which has an important index located 20% of the way through, and saves article data at the 75% mark.Consider a scenario where an editor comes and creates a new article at the same time a backup is being performed, which is being made as a simple "file copy" which copies from the beginning to the end of the large file(s) and doesn't consider data consistency - and at the time of the article edit, it is 50% complete.