UPDATE: Nevermind. Craig B. answered on another forum and it looks like it could have been that the client had the files open when the copy to CD was done.

Does anyone have any idea how a group of tables can all suddenly contain 0 bytes? Our system has hundreds of tables, but somehow a client has managed to destroy about 70 of them in one swoop. And of course, they don't have a backup. Somehow this may have happened when they were trying to copy files to a CD; they didn't realize that under XP they had to "Write these files to CD", so they had a large queue of files to write - but when we finished that process for them, the copies of the tables were also 0 bytes.

The 70-odd files (mostly .dbf's, but a few .fpt's as well) all show last written to at 5:14 or 5:15 yesterday, about the time they were supposedly attempting the copy process. Most if not all of those tables also have .cdx's associated with them, but those (the .cdx files themselves) are undamaged - and show much earlier timestamps. And it would appear that these are the tables most often written to, they certainly included the most important - and most difficult to reconstruct - data in the system. I'm not sure of any way to confirm or deny, but this may have been all the tables open at a given moment.

I'm not asking for help on recovering the data - although, if someone has a miracle up their sleeve, I would certainly welcome that, too. What I'm asking here is, what could have happened? Either inside VFP or externally? Any ideas at all will be appreciated.

In case it matters, the system is running VFP 9.0 runtime, compiled under SP1. The PC they are using is not on a network at all, and is running XP Home.