Hi, Ed-

>Nancy, to make a recommendation really would require knowing more about the platform. If the CD-RW he has comes with the Adaptec DirectCD software, which allows the CD to be treated as a big floppy (there are tons of alternatives, but the most widely circulated one is Adaptec's (now Roxio's) product), then it'd be trivial to check the amount of disk space needed, check if there's that much space on the CD, and invoke a file copy operation (maybe using the SHFileOperation() API call, or perhaps simply starting a pre-defined MS Backup job to a file name on the CD drive, provided on the command line if the platform shipped with it; basically anything except original Win95) to the target CD. The problem doesn't become more complex as long as you want to back up all files completely as a snapshot every time.

Well, I've had Adaptec and CreateCD (creative labs) had to get rid of Adaptec...my CDs I burned weren't reliably readable and it locked the device when I tried to use CreateCD. So I've gone to that. Even if I could be sure the Adaptec driver would work, I'd investigate automating that from VFP. Formatting a CD, and so on. CreateCD...I don't know if I can automate a schedule for that. Have really only just started digging into the alternatives, as you can tell.

>You may want to use a product like WinZip or DynaZip to compress the backup,

Yep. That's one option. But the data for now easily fits onto a CD.

> allowing the CD to safely back up more data - data in native DBF files is tremendously compressible in most cases. You need a mechanism to ensure that no other users (or even the current user) have any of the files of interest open for the duration of the snapshot process.

Right.

>There are dozens of backup products, many of which work with CD-RW or other disk-style removable storage, as well as to tape. There are a couple of ActiveX control based products that can be incorporated into the VFP app to interact with a third-party backup product to handle the backup as well.

That was the direction I was heading.

> More information about the environment, data volume, and controllability of file access during the backup process would be necessary to address this more adequately.

Files will be released, though I won't code the app to assume that. The environment is a W2K server, NT workstations, ethernet. Data is about 150 MB and that's generous.