That's part of the equation in my original post. There are dependencies that cause the last process to have to run after people are in the system. We can not kick them out every morning. Any backups will not have the data from the first processes. This has much to do with investment results coming in at night and having to process after that. The window we have to process all this data overlaps into our regular business day.

My questions are really how this ever works, or could possibly be relied on, and what causes are there for table corruptions so I can narrow down if the copying is even the primary issue. Yours is different as you use a backup of the data. We are not able to do that.

>Well, at Bata I scheduled what I consider the main backup at midnight, when nobody uses the system. The noon backup might help recover some data if something happens to the production data.
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>On the other hand, I never had any problems using the backup data created this way - although I do recognize that the procedure is doubtful.
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>Probably you should just make sure that everyone logs out of the system, before doing a backup.