file corruption - occurred during use

[mscholtz]

The weirdest corruption I've yet seen w/ FMP. I'm building a db for a client using FMP Dev 7.0v3 on Win XP. I've been working on this project for over a month now without any major hitches. I'm building separate front- and back-end files (only 2 files).

My habit when developing is to make very frequent copies of the files using File > Save a Copy As. I just let FMP fill up the directory w/ automatically-numbered copies, then periodically save some to zips and delete the rest.

Yesterday I did the following, in this order:

* Saved most recent copies (from day before yesterday) to zip

* opened the working files

* after poking around, ran a DDR report and poked around in there for a while

* made a few changes, saved copy of the front-end

* worked for several hours, during the course of which the files behaved absolutely normally. During this time I made probably 12 copies of the front-end and 5 of the back.

So far so good. No sign of trouble. However, when I go to open the db today I find "File Damaged. Cannot open." I'm used to seeing this after a crash, but nothing was out of the ordinary, FMP closed down normally, etc. I figure it must have hiccupped on shutdown, and I try my most recent backup. Damaged. And you guessed it: all my backups from the entire session - damaged.

Here's the weirdest parts:

* It's only the front-end. Back-end file seems to be fine (working file and all backups).

* As I mentioned, the file behaved fine the entire time I was using it during the session.

* I tried recovering the most recent file, and it claims to have successfully recovered. (I know better than to go ahead w/ development with the recovered copy, but I was planning on copying over some scripting and layout objects.) I opened it and all seemed to be well, until I pulled up a layout with a lot of pasted external graphics. Layout came up blank, FMP crashed, damaged file. (BTW, I didn't chnage anything at all on this layout between my last uncorrupted copy and the first corrupted one.)

* I tried recovering an earlier backup from same session. Again, FMP reported recovered fine. When opened, however, all layouts are gone. Simply missing. All tables and relationships seem to be intact. If I try to create a new layout, FMP crashed, damaged file.

My questions/comments:

* Has anyone else seen this, where a file becomes corrupted while in use with no sign of trouble, but can't be reopened after it's closed?

* If this can happen, how can I ever rely on the fact that my files aren't becoming damaged as I work? Do I need to quit and reopen the files every 15 minutes?

* Has anyone noticed FM7 corruption related to stored graphics?

* Is FM7's recover feature still really as clueless as it seems? I thought they claimed to have improved it.

* Has anyone seen corruption related to running a DDR report on open files, or to using Save Copy As?

* If nothing else, consider yourselves warned.

Thanks y'all,

Matthew