>A lot of commentary here about migrating from VFP to .NET, Python etc. I accept all the arguments (mainly anyway).
>
>Don't hear so much about which db to migrate to that fits the "crash safe" criteria I have for using VFP tables:
>
> * very difficult to harm the tables in power failures, random reboots, voltage spikes etc
> * easy to strip out and rebuild table headers (and an app can sense and do this automatically)
> * yet high performance ...
>
>My app is typically run on a laptop (or dodgy hardware) in a remote location. I have one on a mine site that I haven't been able to visit since 2001!
>How robust is, say, MS SQL Server Compact Edition by comparison? Can you cut the power without corruption problems? Any other suggestions?

Compact Edition is still a file based database (like VFP tables) and is almost as easy to corrupt.

SQL Server or Express are server versions (although they can be installed on workstations) - the user never has the database open directly. Corruption is very unlikely in a power failure, and built in recovery features make it about as solid as you can get. We have users still running applications we installed in 1999 on SQL2000 that run like clockwork.