I had the same delima.

So I opted for the winzip approach. It let's you make a backup of the file while it's open on mulitple workstations. It will give you an error log as to which files were open durring the back up.

But it does get them into the zip file. That zip is then backed up and all files are good.

This is safe. And I like that point.

__Stephen Russell


>>WINZip protects me in this critical area. So I just paid for it and its done. What do you do for backups in 24x7 environments? Kick everyone off?
>
>I've never been involved with a 24x7 multi-user environment (23.9x7 yes).
>
>But I have this comment: Lets say you don't kick everyone off. You have a process that changes 10 tables. One user begins this process. Another user starts the backup. The backup copies 4 of the tables before the (other user's) process and 6 of the tables after the (other user's) process. Now, is that backup any good? Is it a good set of data?
>
>I have never had to worry about this because we make backups when users are not using the data, but I am wondering how you backup data when users are in the midst of making multi-table changes.
>
>Joe