I am using Filemaker 3.0 (yes, I know, very old!). We recently experienced a computer crash; afterwards, we noticed that in most of the records in our database, significant amounts of information was missing from fields. It seemed pretty sporadic- couldn't find any pattern to the amount of data missing in each record. It seemed that it was out of the same field for the most part (a repeating field), but there was some information missing out of other fields in some records.

It appears that the data that is still there is good data. It is just a bunch is missing that we can't seem to locate, or figure out what happened.

Any ideas of what might have happened or how to retrieve the missing data? We can restore from a backup and reenter the data that hadn't been backed up, however I'm questioning the stability of the dataabase at this point and wondering if once we do that, how we can insure that it doesn't happen again.

Hi imaginal,

What you've experienced is not all that common, but it does happen. If FileMaker (or any other program, for that matter, is in the process of writing a file update to disk right when a crash occurs, data loss or corruption is the result, and the recovery process is then able to restore all the data which still makes sense in what is left in the file, but data that has been partially overwritten is lost.

For this reason, it is a good idea to return to a 'clean' backup copy of the file and re-enter data to bring it up to date. This is always a good idea after a crash, because corruption can affect parts of the file that you don't see, which can become problematic down the track.

Providing you work from clean files and backup reasonably frequently, you should have little to worry about - but files that have been only partially recovered are certainly not a good proposition.