What you're running into is one of the fundamental failures of computer systems. Computer's have no clue what they are storing! In fact, my industry (the storage industry) seems to think that all we need to provide you is a directory and a filename and you should worship us. In reality, people don't want to work with files, they want to work with something called Information Assets. These are collections of files, metadata, people, processes, emails, etc., that as a set, are meaningful to your or your business. These things change, are related to one another, are part of larger sets, etc. This is how people think, talk, communicate with others, and yet computer's don't even come close to supporting this type of behavior. If you would like to see more about the idea of Information Assets with an example, here is a link to a short paper on the subject. "www.expeditefile.com/assets/assetmanagementpart1v2.pdf" - Introduction To Information Asset Management. It is a no-register PDF. There are a huge number of other failures that are caused by this wrong information model. However, what's worse is the industry forces every computer owner to go figure out their own way to maintain the integrity of their "digital assets". That's why you have seen multiple suggestions on how to do backup, etc. What you have touched on is a huge issue that I'm afraid, very few people understand much less have any way to solve. Hopefully, we will be able to fix this someday... :( Bruce