I am writing an application that used to backup some specified file, therefore using the backup API calls i.e CreateFile BackupRead and WriteFile API's. getting errors Access violation reading location. I have attached code below. #include <windows.h> int main() { HANDLE hInput, hOutput; //m_filename is a variable holding the file path to read from hInput = CreateFile(L"C:\\Key.txt", GENERIC_READ, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, FILE_FLAG_BACKUP_SEMANTICS, NULL); //strLocation contains the path of the file I want to create. hOutput= CreateFile(L"C:\\tmp\\", GENERIC_WRITE, NULL, NULL, CREATE_ALWAYS, NULL, NULL); DWORD dwBytesToRead = 1024 * 1024 * 10; BYTE *buffer; buffer = new BYTE[dwBytesToRead]; BOOL bReadSuccess = false,bWriteSuccess = false; DWORD dwBytesRead,dwBytesWritten; LPVOID lpContext; //Now comes the important bit: do { bReadSuccess = BackupRead(hInput, buffer, sizeof(BYTE) *dwBytesToRead, &dwBytesRead, false, true, &lpContext); bWriteSuccess= WriteFile(hOutput, buffer, sizeof(BYTE) *dwBytesRead, &dwBytesWritten, NULL); }while(dwBytesRead == dwBytesToRead); return 0; } Any one suggest me how to use these API's? Thanks.