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>In at least some mission-critical systems I've worked on, the database is locked (IOW all tables have FLOCKs acquired in VFP terms) and then mirrored out to another file system. The mirrored tables are then backed up; no users are accessing the mirrored tables, so that a consistent state is maintained, even though other users may continue to access the database for lookups while the data is mirrored in preparation for backup. In any case, there is some period of time where updates to the database are deferred or denied, in order to guarentee that the data backup is valid.

This is basically what we do...but we are a little less sophisticated. We just make sure everyone is out of the system (no files in use on the server), un-share the server's hard drive, copy the files, put the server back up, and backup the copy of the data. If someone tries to access the files during the file copying, they get the approprate message. This is something that we may change in the future, but in our situation it works for now.

Take care,
Joe