Thanks, but this won't do it in this case...the data is accessed by dentist offices and pharmacies across the country. We can't stipulate when they can and cannot process claims. Our regular users are not a problem.

It might be that a timed backup in the wee hours of the morning would be best...we could shut everyone out for a few minutes at 4:00 EST (which would be between 1:00 and 5:30 across the country I think) without any real problem...our only concern with that is that if the backup program fails, we might have a hung machine or some other problem with nobody around...

Anyways, thanks again,

Joe

>I design my apps so every user always has open a specific shared table, AboutApp, at startup. This table also has a logical field called AppLocked. I set this to true when I need exclusive access to tables for indexing, modification and backing up. My Splash screen has a timer in it that fires every 1 minute to check the value of this field. If it is TRUE, then I alert the users to logout of the app or risk having my App_Shutdown code fire on its own to kick them out.
>
>Once I can gain exclusive use of AboutApp, I know it is safe to do whatever I need to do. Also, during app startup, I have function that does a fopen() on the AboutApp.dbf file to see if can be opened R/W. If not, I know the app is locked, and alert the user that the app is unavailable, and to try back later.
>
>I then use DynaZip to create a backup zip file to the local HD or CD-RW if they have one. This backup file can be created from any workstation, so I advise my users to do this backup from a different PC every day. That way they have multiple backups. I also name the zip file with the DTOS(Date()) string in it.
>
>>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