Filemaker has a great function that allows you to recover a file when it is corrupted etc. It checks all the file and compresses the data and any glitches it repairs but it then creates a new file for this recovered file to be saved as.

I am using a file that is storing a lot of data and includes a lot of pictures, the file is very big but as I define feels and tweak the database I often feel that the databse is not as compact and efficient as it could be at the moment I can resolve this by recovering the file but it is a bit of a pain. Microsoft Access has a function that allows you to compact the database and I was wondering if Filemaker has a similar function that I can build into a script without creating a new file.

First: Do NOT use File-Recover to compact the Database. Use "save as..", "compressed copy".

Second:

In MS Access, unused space is not recovered automatically when data is deleted and therefore you might get a 50% or more saving in disk space.

Unused space is automatically recovered by FileMaker. It is not necessary to run a "compress" in FileMaker.

However, when using the "compress" option, FileMaker does some additional cleaning up and compressing of data which can sometimes speedup some operations a little. But the savings in size are neglectable in most cases, depending on your data and field indexes. The speedup is mainly a result of defragmenting the file on disk (by saving a copy of it...).

To speed up operations on your file, keep the graphics in a separate, related file (linked by record id) or import your graphics as reference only. This will speed up search times, as the file containing the actual info to be searches is a lot smaller.

No compressing necessary here. Also, files without graphics have a greater chance of recovery after a severe crash ....