Hi Colin,

If you don't understand why I and others don't recommend packing on a regular basis, you will understand sooner or later, I promise you! If you get a data error in one of your tables, a pack will cause an error and your system will hang. If you are really out of luck, you may even lose your data. Believe me, I know! A data error can come no matter how many safety features you build into your system, both hardware and software can cause errors. For instance it can be caused by a transient on the power line or someone turning off their computer in the middle of a process, or a defect RAM module or hard drive.

Without any doubt, the best approach is to reuse deleted records. The second best is to copy the not deleted records to new tables, zap the tables and append from the new tables. Then you will also have a backup set in the same process. If you want to be really safe, you also copy the deleted records to a seperate set of backup files.

>Mohammed
>
>I have a VFP executable which packs and reindexes all my tables - I then use the Windows scheduler to run it at 2am in the morning
>
>I don't understand the logic of infrquent packing - I do it every night and whenever the performance on the network is slow
>
>Since I am operating a super fast server I can do it remotely if required for the 8 installations I control
>
>Colin Northwat