Hi charles,

>I guess I failed to understand that your approach involved locking all the tables during the duration of the backup.

This will prevent other users to update tables during the process of making copies of the files.

>I was also under the impression that the COPY TO approach lost long field names, so the tables created in the backup would have the possibility of duplicate field names if uniqueness was not established in the first ten characters. Does the copyfile() api call address this problem?

Yes, in fact you're making an exact duplicate of your database files.

>I had just always taken as a matter of faith that DBFs were not appropriate for applications which required 24/7 backup capability.

When designing you application carefully it should be possible. I'll hope this thread will produce a fail-safe strategy.

Walter,