>One of my clients just had an employee accidentally delete all of the Word documents that their VFP applications use to merge data for printing their legal notices. I know the users need access to the documents and to the directory where they reside in order for the application to access them, but there must be a way to protect them from modification or deletion. The client tells me that this system has been in use for 15 years and this has never happened before, but I suppose it was just a matter of time.
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>The Word automation process works like this: the original document is opened in Word, copied and the text pasted into a new blank document. The original is closed and data is merged into the copy. After the copy is printed, it is closed without saving. This process applies to 16 of the 18 documents. The other 2 are 'custom' documents that users may edit after the data has been merged. Users are allowed to save these custom documents but the copies are supposed to go in their personal directories, not the application directory. I suspect what happened today is that the user went looking for her copy and somehow deleted all of the originals, perhaps thinking they were in her directory.

The application could have had read-only access to the files. The application could have copied the necessary file to a local temp directory for subsequent processing. One or two people could have had write access to the files to make changes for all.

Everything is just a matter of time. IMO it's irrelevant how long something has worked. It's only important how well it works.