John Leahy of the Wexford list was able to help me. Family Tree Maker makes two backup files. In my despair at the time I only tried to restore from the one and not from the other. The restored file is almost a year old and 4 megs less so that gives you an idea of what I've still got to go thru. I'm going to contact FTM and see if I can still salvage my original. If not John has saved me alot of typing. Thank you so much for everyone's kind thoughts. Chris Doehring St. Louis Now to copy the file to another directory