Ahh, well if you allow third-parties into the picture, it changes somewhat. [Backup utility problems snipped] Since it's a microsoft utility, you can bet that the moment you upgrade windows, the backups will be unusable, since the new, improved version will be completely incompatible. Bingo. Windows is not an enterprise class system, nor, IMNSHO, is it even worthy of being used in a production context. ... but back to the topic at hand. :) In a single utility? Perhaps not, but how much "context" do you expect from DOS? :) The built-in backup program would copy files onto some other medium, and a recovery disk could at least be made relatively simply. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your complaint, though. My problem with the DOS backup utility was that every time somebody at m$ re-compiled something, your old backups were useless. I assume a third-party add-on would fix that. I find that TAR gives me useable backups in general. Again, there's no such thing as a "standalone tar," so you'll need a recovery disk/tape/something. It also has CPIO if you're into that sort of thing, and several third-party things. See unix above... also note that TAR may be available for OS/2. It is slightly harder to build an OS/2 recovery disk. Well, do you consider that space part of your "context?" Where is the line drawn? Also note that the empty space isn't exactly empty in most cases. As for "all-or-nothing" replacement, that's not exactly the case. You certainly could mount an image right from the backup device (very slowly for tape ;) and read files out. It would be a larger problem if your backups don't fit filesystem-for-cartrige. I'm relatively convinced that as long as you can backup files and attributes (including ACL, etc), treating special files as if they were (special, that is...), you ought to be ok. The only place you'd get bitten is in systems that need to know an exact location of a bootable image, or other such special file. That can probably be handled in the restore procedure, though. So I think DOS and Unix can be backed up pretty well. Windows is a different story, I guess. It would help, for windows, of course, if they'd provide a decent, uniform, block-device access method. Don't hold your breath, though. What really makes it inexcusable is the fact that a backup utility shouldn't be too difficult to cook up. Regards, Chris Christopher Smith, Perl Developer Amdocs - Champaign, IL /usr/bin/perl -e ' print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n"); '