I hope that Mom and Pop also know how to avoid p*ss*ng off that soon-to-be-ex employee who knows how to import their customer list, financial info, etc. from those DBFs into Excel (or whatever) and take it with him/her to the competitor that he's going to work for (or starting up).

That's another SQL/.NET consultant con job. Most mom and pops don't have in house IT people, and if they did, they [the p-o'd IT guy], could steal it anyway. To most people in a business, the integreity and health of the data are important to the company. If the company does good - they will do good. I have never met a discruntled employee - well except for used to be almost VFP develpers preparing to be used to be almost .NET or SQL developers!:-)


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And that they know how to make good backup copies of their data and are OK reconstructing at least the work that was done since the last backup, should they run into DBF file corruption.

I have never has a file corruption issue - some systems out there have been humming along for almost 10 years! And they have BIG files! I must be doing something wrong.

If you write VFP programs that have file corruption issues, please, by all means, move to .NET. Don't taint the rest of us with an inability to deliver the goods!