Thanks for the replay, Ric. I'm hoping I can work up a script to use a variable USB drive letter, although I'm not sure if that's possible, either, as you mentioned. I'm a lightweight on mySQL and I've not tried to change the physical location of a mySQL file before (normally, I just dump it and import it to different server). After a bit of Google-ing it was not clear to me how I should accomplish a physical location move with US. My end goal is to encrypt my db using mySQL encryption, store just the db on the USB stick, then have US in a folder on the desktop of different PCs. I'll experiment with the migration tool as you suggested. Thanks, again. John