That's the problem with backups of any kind, but certainly magnified if you're doing hourly backups of individual tables. I would never trust any backup to be 100% accurate unless it's done off-hours when no one is on the database. Otherwise, you could get backups of header data without the detail data because someone hadn't gotten to that part of the form yet. Or you catch some batch processing program in the middle of updating a bunch of tables, so some tables are updated but others aren't.
I remember years ago pre-Windows when a client was doing hourly backups. His db got trashed during a power outage. We restored from an hourly backup (it just did an XCOPY of the entire database). They checked whether a particular batch program had been run against that database and decided it hadn't because the "batch date", which was stored in a table, was still from the previous day. So they ran it again and really screwed up their data. The problem was that the Batch Date was written to the table as the last thing in the program, and the outage occurred in the middle of the batch program! It's just "better than nothing" if you do have a catastrophic event, but you probably would still have to do some detective work to figure out if you got all the data you expected. Karen > Dan, > What makes the program run every hour? How do you get it to start? > What happens if someone is changing data in a table when the program is > running? > Mike
