In the light of later posts to this thread, can we start again ? If I understand correctly, you have two requirements: 1) Make a backup copy of the database. 2) Do not use as much filespace for the backup as the database file takes. How do you expect to do both of these things ? Unless you have a lot of indexes, SQLite is a compact file format. You can't do both of these things at once. Or did I misunderstand one of your requirements ?