>If DBFs are in use, trying to copy them will give you essentially the same result as if all of your users had suddenly powered their PCs off. There may be data written to headers that is incomplete or has not been written as actual records, there may be data that is still cached on the users' computers. You will very likely wind up with broken databases.
>
>SQL server can backup cleanly while the database is in use.
>
>>There are a couple of ways, including XCopy/WinZip that will copy the files, it does not guarentee you have the latest data or that the data is in sync with files backed up prior because the data may change in the meantime.
>>

What we do is to take hourly snapshots of important files using by using VFP - opening the files as shared and copying them to another location - works a treat - if we want to reinstate the file all we have to do is to rebuild the indexes - very quick

Colin