My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.- Princess Bride People on ludes should not drive! - Fast Times @ Ridgemont High Chewmanitutonkshaowacheciela- Dances with Wolves

Have you considered using Excel for some of the reports? You can put complex queries directly in it or build views to support the users. We do that for many one offs that will be reused frequently.

The answer is whatever the user finds easiest to accomplish. As others have mentioned, the options are local backup to external disk, RAID, backup to an internal disk or cloud backup. For pictures, I think Google has their new service that gives you unlimited high quality storage. There are a host of backup providers, many only charging $5/month which is certainly worth the aggravation of losing years of photos. I personally backup in the following manner: Internal drive- I have a script that robocopies all of my data to an internal drive. Acronis to external drive- I have continuous backup running. Box- Have a 50G box account that backs up everything but pictures and music. Google- backs up pictures. Admitted this is a little overkill but I'd hate to tell the wife we just lost all of our music or pictures because I wasn't backing up properly.

Kevin, as with all projects, determine the clients needs, then see if the existing solution meets those needs. Changing a solution just because the current solution 'sucks' in your opinion (and many others I realize) is not a real answer. If it is a small office and Access is doing it's job with minimal issues, then why force them through the change? You could suggest an upgrade path to them of migrating the backend to MS SQL (or Express) or another database (speed, stability) and then going after the front end. We use a custom app that is Access based and are currently migrating to MS SQL as the backend. We've gotten around the updating issue by forcing a copy of the front end to each user when they start the app. That way they always have the latest code and no user is more than a day away from an update or fix (or a simple exit and restart). Personally, if I had my choice, I'd convert the front end to a rich web app with the SQL backend. Eventually we'll get there, but cost is always an issue.