>>>I honestly think it is foolhardy for anyone to think they can either continue to run, or resurrect in 30 years, an application written today! The pace of change is growing daily and consideratons for the past are shrinking.
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>>I was actually thinking about a strategy of having an archive menu option where I dump my VFP tables into 'A.N. Other' format which will be readable longer than the native tables. XML might do, especially if dumped with XSLT markup code to at least display the rudiments of the data and its structure in the 'browser of the future'.
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>>Who has done this?
>
>I did, but it took minutes to restore few dozen megs from XML data. So I just kept it out of the later versions and stayed with good ole zipping.

But what if, in 10 or 15 years, .ZIP is a thing of the past because all data is stored/backed up in Microsoft's 'big vault in the sky' and all users do is to say they need a special copy put to virtual place //xxxxx to run some special program against it?
Our PCs might all be 128-bit based by then with no backward compatibility for 32-bit or 64-bit. What good would a .zip file be then in 30 years?