>>I am looking for suggestions on backup procedures to include in an application. Ideally, it would need to include compression and flexibility regarding files to backup and where they will be backed up to.
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>Hi John. Just a question out of curiosity...
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>How come you aren't relying on a workstation or network backup to occur.

Evan

This is a commercial application. There are a variety of users... from single users to network users. Our application creates a set of four DBF files to store their data in. When they say they want to backup, they would indicate they want to backup file "XYZ", and our application knows that it has to backup all four (or more) files associated with this company's data. Unlike many applications, our app allows them to create numerous data files (that are actually four DBF's) and they need an easy way to backup their data from within our app. It not just a simply matter of backing up the same files all the time; it has to be much more flexible than that.

At this point in time, we are using VFP, but not using DBC's. We need to maintain complete data compatibility with our DOS (FoxPro 2.6) and 16-bit windows (FoxPro for Windows 2.6) versions. Our plans are to drop the 16-bit windows version and then perhaps jump to DBC's; however, their are some inherent problems that we have not yet been able to overcome. For example, currently we use the extension on a group of files to determine what is store in the file. For example, the four data files that a user might create will have extensions of A1, A2, A3, and A5. If we use DBC's, it doesn't like it if you try to change the extensions on files. This means that we have to use the prefix of the file name and store the data files in separate directories. We haven't figured it out yet, but we're working on it. Any thoughts?

Regards, John