Personally I'd leave it split.  If it's going to get corrupted it always seems to be the Forms and VBA that die a cruel death for me at least.  Yeah it's a pain relinking or linking tables to the front end, but. I'd rather have it where if something corrupted it can be easily replaced with the backup.  I know same thing. But what if you entered new data into the database before the corruption (and you forgot to back up.)