Hi Mike,

> is it really the best, simplest tool for the job?

"best" as in "my first choice" if I had multiple choices? Certainly not.

If you have a time where no-one is working in the application (in fact, not changing data is sufficient), any commercial backup utility is a better choice than VFP.

However, if you don't have any or sufficient down time, I haven't yet found an alternative. All serious backup tools that I'm aware of handle a single open file just fine. But for application level integrity they need application specific modules. There are tools for backing up SQL Server, Exchange Server, Oracle, mySQL, and so on. But I'm not aware of any backup program that works with VFP files and handles even the problem of backing up only consistent sets of DBF/CDX/FPT, even less tools that handle VFP's transactions properly.

99.99% of the time a backup program that can save open files will work just fine. But the remaining 0.01% you end up with a corrupt database when you restore a backup.