Frederic,

> - having backups available in an easily accessible and
> documented XML format guarantees a "way out" with
> all enterprise data in case any of these unforeseen
> problems should happen, within a narrow time window

Out of curiousity, what XML parser will use to read a multi-giga xml file ?
Or maybe it's just the gbk's structure that you want to see in the xml file
?

Regards.

--
Jerome