>Is there some magic you are using here? If I specify the Backup copy of the DBC container in the COPY TO DATABASE clause, it tells me that the name is already used by the DBC, please

I was just thinking, another way of doing this if you're not using Stonefield would be to keep a copy of the DBC and empty copies off all the tables and indexes in a directory. When you need to do the backup, make a copy of these files into a backup directory. Then open your main DBC, grab the list of tables and cycle through them. As you walk through the tables, open the source table, then the destination table. Do an APPEND FROM into the destination table (you'll probably have to use the full paths here or ALIAS to make sure you're working with the correct tables).