tilly,

Well, you're bringing a number of excellent issues, none of which I had planned to address at this point. C'est le guerre.

Data is minimal at this point; disk space isn't.

While I am not the _owner_, per se, I am co-administrator, so I have as much physical resources as I need...for testing. In production, otoh, I have zilch, squat, nada. I am the lone gunman. Mulder has Frohike, Langley, and Beyers. I'm expected to serve as all three. (Isn't that a weird thought?)

Changes do not currently happen very quickly. I'm taking advantage of this to learn the best practices, thus leading to my continued and un-ending questions on the subject. Please note that *_DATA_* currently enjoys a strong demarcation (as well as separate backup process). In my examples, please assume that \data refers to some other, external data source with a strategic and complete backup process administered by someone else (as well as my own TRUSTNO1 backups).

Your points are well taken, though, and I appreciate all of them. As soon as I have some votes...

What I'm really worried about the security issues that I haven't *_seen_*. I hope others will forgive me, but merlyn was quite adamant. Assuming that he's correct, that gives me pause. I know I can't make my system 100% secure, however, I want to exercise all due caution in my implementation _and_ make d@mn sure I don't leave an exploit open. I can't personally afford the mistake.