>As a general rule I stay away from memo fields because of possible data corruption and memo bloat. I would like some feedback from those who use memo fields in VFP6 with Free Tables - are they problematic, especially as to file corruption (bloat is not so much an issue on this app) or not?
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>TIA,
>Bill

Bill,

Memo fields are good for what memo fields are good for, that being non-critical free form textual data or blobs. Memo fields are no more or less vulnerable to corruption than any other files is. The "memo bloat" is not a problem, it is a fact of how memo fields are maintained and it easily fixed with an occasional PACK MEMO command. Memo fields have been stable and good for use since FoxPro 2.0 and before. The only recent change has been that the field in the dbf table now is only 4 bytes instead of 10 bytes.

The best practise for protecting memo daat from loss is the same as the best practise for anything related to database systems, backup, backup, and backup. Once you've that, backup again.