Hello,

This isn't really a VFP specific question, but I thought the UT would be a good place to get some ideas.

Currently where I'm employed, we do a daily backup of VFP data and some other files (word processing, etc.). When we do this, the VFP data is static. I have consider this to be important to keep everything "in sync". For example, I didn't want this to happen: backup is started; user begins a task that changes 2 tables; backup copies FILE1.DBF; user completes task and FILE1.DBF and FILE2.DBF are updated; backup copies FILE2. In this case, the backed-up data for FILE1 and FILE2 are "out of sync". It might be a parent-child relationship and one table has the recent transaction's records and the other doesn't. This would be a huge problem with DBC's too. I hope this example is clear.

So, currently this is no problem as the backup is only run when nobody is "in the system" and nobody has access to the system (the data directory is actually unshared after it is ensured that no files are open). But, this is something that we might want to change in the future. This data may have to be available for lookup/updates 24/7. I am wondering what others are doing in this situation.

Is a tape backup the way to go? I've heard of organizations actually "pulling" a hard drive out of a RAID array and taking it offsight as a backup. Does anyone here do this? Any ideas/insight would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe