yes i'd be quite happy to share the utility. it's got the location of my 'incomplete' folder hard coded into it and a few other specific things like that hardcoded at the moment so i'd have to make those specifyable somehow. i'll see if i can change that in the next day or two.

is the incompletes folder always called "Incomplete"?

Yes it always has the same name. That would be good if you could do that.

at the moment if the downloads.dat file say, goes smaller than it was a few minutes ago, the utility will not make a back up until the downloads file reaches the same size or goes larger than it was. the thinking being if it drops in size that's likely to be a problem so don't back it up. but it does drop in size in correct use as things are finished downloading i think (that's right isn't it?). so i'm not sure how to handle that. what are the characteristics of a corrupt downloads file? disappeared/gone obviously. going back to a size of 4k was a very common one i remember (a fresh empty downloads.dat file which is actually probably a smaller than 4k but that's the smallest block size on a drive). do corrupt files ever have a larger size than 4k generally? i suspect the utility might be better continually making backups so long as there is a downloads.dat file that is greater than 4k in size (or maybe a 10k to be safe) regardless of if it's got smaller or not. any thoughts?

Salut all, the downloads.dat or downloads.bak (the backup of downloads.dat) will erase data of an incomplete file that just completed (maybe if the file is deleted from LW library also), so its normal to decrease in size. Your utility should backup on a time course more than size growth of the file.

Maybe your utility should also backup the incomplete files also if you have enough disk space.

Suggestion: leave 10.2.8 and find a copy of 10.3 or 10.4 on ebay. They just perform much better wheter you use a G3 or G4. Do yourself that favor!

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the danger is that if the downloads.dat file becomes corrupt (and later dated), the corrupt version will be backed up over a good back up that my utility has made making the whole thing useless. i think i've got the logic of it sussed now. every x number of minutes it does the following:

maybe. the loss of the downloads.dat/bak file has been my main problem with lw, not so much with loss or currupt partial files (although who knows -- maybe i get that aswell without knowing because once the downloads.dat/bak file has gone the partials are as good as useless). i'll see how this goes first.

thanks.