Thanks Warren. I read that thread but I still don't see an argument against having the # option even if it should only be used for development purposes. Nor has anyone address my backup example or the difficulty in creating a duplicate table with 'create table as insert * from ..'.
Its simple enough to get a list of the cols ('select group_concat(name,', ') from pragma_table_info(?1);') but you've then got to remove the virtual cols (assuming you can recall them without looking up the table DDL) and then paste the resulting string into another query which will then look long & ugly. I'll be able to find a way of automating it but I wouldn't fancy describing the steps involved to a newbie evaluating sqlite. Having said that I admit I couldn't find any sql software that allowed 'excluding cols' from *.