Corrupted Relationships/Data

[tawatana]

Hi,

I've got a couple of issues I'd like to discuss.

First some background on our system.

We have 3 computers running Win2000 and Filemaker Pro 5.5.

There are about 5 regularly used databases sitting on one of the computers and the other 2 machines share them. The admin chick's computer is the one that they are stored on as she uses them most often (every day).

Sometimes one of the other users will open them first and "host" the databases for the other users - I reckon this is a bit of a problem, can someone confirm this for me?

The other big problem is that occasionally (used to be about once per week, now it's not so regular) the admin chick would be in a big rush to get home and turn off her computer while the databases were still open on other computers.

As you can imagine this did not sit well with the databases, usually they would just do a integrity? check when starting again but sometimes I would have to "recover" the databases.

Once or twice, even that didn't work, luckily I save regular backups so I just restored them.

Now the databases seem to have data/relationship problems almost every week, by that I mean some scripts will all of a sudden point to the wrong database, some relationships will disappear. I realise that filemaker will "learn" new paths to databases if the user selects a different database when filemaker cannot find the file specified in the relationship, but the users assure me that they are not doing this.

After reading some previous postings on data corruption, I believe that the databases have become corrupted due to the incorrect closing of the databases.

I've been asking my boss for a while to set up a separate computer to store the databases (she won't purchase filemaker server), and now I'm sure that the reason we are having all these problems is because they are stored on the admin chick's computer - with her haphazard shut off procedures.

Now I'm trying to work out the best way to fix the databases.

Is there some function or program that might clean out the corruption?

If not, could I maybe start with a new database, import all the fields into it, then import all the records/scripts etc..

Would that fix things or would I be importing corrupted stuff as well.

Can someone give me their thoughts on all this.

Thanks for your time.

Brian

[BobWeaver]

The problem is that if one user opens the files directly, the next user may not think to open them using the hosts option. If both users try to open them directly, you are guaranteed to have problems with file corruption. The best way to prevent this is to make the files inaccessible to the network. However, this will mean that the machine where the files are stored will have to have filemaker running all the time with the files open so that other users can access them via 'hosts'

Might be a good idea to set up a spare computer as a server.

[Lee Smith]

[color:"blue"] > Might be a good idea to set up a spare computer as a server.

Boy is this an understatement.

It's either that or Kill the Admin "Chick"

Lee

[LiveOak]

If you create "clean" clones from known good backup copies and import the data from your current files, it is unlikely that the corruption will follow the data.

-bd

[tawatana]

i thought i'd try a simple cleaning before embarking on something complicated, so i ended up just creating an empty clone of each current 'corrupt' database and then i imported all the records from these 'corrupted' databases into the new clean clones.

the file sizes were a bit different, from memory the cleaned versions were a bit smaller. maybe someone knows why.

the good news is that we haven't had any problems since i performed this operation and the admin chick has moved on to another job

[Lee Smith]

Hi Tawatana,

Your files were compacted from this process. Don't worry, your files will grow once you start using them. Just do a few finds and you will see what I mean.

Lee