>Hi everyone
>Please let me know about the backup & recovery methods
>in Visual Foxpro.
>Why fox community not discuss this hot topic. how can
>we backup large database (>1GB) online,offline, replication, mirroring etc.
>
>Hope that Universalthread community will discuss this topic.
>
>Thanks
>
>Jaffar

In general, a database server has more options than VFP in this respect.

In VFP, I have successfully copied the DBF, FPT and CDX files.

First step, I copy the files to another directory, in case anybody left their systems open. However, I do this backup at midnight, so that, hopefully, nobody is actively doing changes during the backup.

Later, I delete some un-needed files, and then use a compression tool.

This looks risky, but I didn't have problems during the last 2-3 years. Still, I consider this one reason to at least consider a database server.

For incremental or differential backups, and using only VFP, you might consider a "roll-forward" strategy, with triggers that record changes to each tables. Look at my article on audit-trails; however, for an automated roll-forward, you will need to adjust the data structure of the audit log.

HTH,

Hilmar.