I am going to answer the suggestions one at a time to all the nice people who have offered suggestions to stop the crashing of FTM when I use the Backup option from the FTM drop down menu. I have never checked the backup during the compact option and I do not have the automatic backup option selected. Ken Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:08:07 -0800 From: bhamilton3@cox.net To: ftm-tech@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [FTM-TECH] FTM CRASHES If you are talking about FTM 2008 or later, the compact option has an option whether to create a backup before compacting. Make sure that is not checked. Something else that may be creating the backup file is whether you have the option to "automatically" backup checked. BJ On 11/23/2011 2:27 PM, Ken Schroeder wrote: I have using FTM since before I can remember but recently developed a problem that I can not solve ... so far. Whenever I try to backup my FTM database, it crashes FTM and tells me the file failed to backup. And when I open FTM it tells me that the file closed improperly and that I may have to compress it. I compress it till there is 0% compression, but I notice that there is in fact a new backup file that was created. Does any one have a clue as to what may be going on and what to do?