I've seen long-time softwares with VFP backends that had a ton of data (10+ years worth) and I had devised a method in one case recently to be able to "archive" old data by storing it in a subfolder intelligently (so it could be easily retrieved and/or reimported into the main data set). I haven't used a VFP backend since 2004 when Bob Lee introduced me to the MySQL world but nonetheless I thought I'd ask if devs here ever put anything like an "archiving" feature into their software, and how they do it. In my case, instead of slinging 600MB of data across the network (in the case of one of my clients), my archiving showed a reduction of like 75%, so only 25% of that was being pulled across the LAN instead. (They didn't need all the data from the beginning of the App's time...they just needed relevant/recent data.)
I realize that with MySQL and other such RDBMSes this is a non-issue, but I wanted to ask the VFP-backend folks their approach to this for the sake of (hopefully) interesting discussion. One final juicy thread before 2017 is finished. :-)