I just did it right now to be sure I wasn't crazy. It worked fine.

Now, note this: these are free dbfs, and none are open for exclusive use. Exclusive is a no-no. But my app does not use tables in exclusive mode, so that's not an issue for me.

It takes about 2-3 minutes to xcopy my data, and sure, you could hit some cases where one table was copied and is out of sync with another while the copy is going on, so it's not perfect.

But, at midnight, when my 7 users are all at home asleep, I can run XCOPY pull a copy of the data, and even thought the left their app alive when they went home, I can still get a copy of the data over to my dev machine.

I know there are plenty of cases in more complex environment where this kind of haackery is just not an option. That's why I love my simple life here!




>I've never been able to backup or XCOPY an open .dbf.
>
>>What do you mean by this? I have a VFP app on our network that has FoxPro .dbf tables open overnight (24x7) and I can backup the .dbf files with no problem (while the app has the tables open, an not using an agent, just regular BackupExec backup software).
>>
>>Plus, I can even XCOPY the dbf files from the server to a folder on my development machine while they are open.