>I’m showing my ignorance but, is there a way to back up only shared data files and have them accepted back into the original database when they needed to be restored?

If you are talking about non-free .dbfs, ie., they "belong" to a .dbc - this shouldn't be a problem. Inside the .dbf, there is, as I recall, backlink information that ties (denotes the association of) the .dbf to its owning .dbc - I suppose that as long as after you restore a backed up .dbf, VFP can find the .dbc along the path specified in the .dbf's backlink, everything should be fine.

>Do you know of an easy to use third party backup and recovery package that would handle the requirements of both single machine backups where shared and local data is on one machine as well as shared data on a server backed up separately from local data on workstations?

No idea - this kind of stuff is usually handled by the Operations Department :)

Cheers