Recovering Deleted Records?

[T-Square]

I have a customer who accidently deleted all the records in a critical table. Naturally, they have no backups. They have sent me their file, and I see that the file is still as large as it would be if the records were still there. I know that in other database applications, data records aren't removed from the file until a later time. I also know that in older versions of Filemaker, it was sometimes possible to read information in the data files directly. However, when I look at the new files, I only see gibberish.

Does anyone have any experience hacking out the data from a damaged FM file? Is it possible to do? If possible, is it a major hassle?

Thanks,

David

[BrentHedden]

Without getting too deep, try opening the file in Filemaker, then perform an export. If it doesn export something, then try importing to a clean file.

[T-Square]

I'm not sure you follow me. The client has deleted the records, and they don't show up in FM, and I can't export or import what Filemaker doesn't see. I think that (as is true with Access) Filemaker "deletes" records without actually overwriting or eliminating the real data until it later needs the space. That would explain why my client's file is still as large as it is, even though they've deleted the records.

My hope is to find a way to open the file using a text editor or some other such tool and extract the ghosts of the records from the part of the file that hasn't yet been overwritten. However, when I look into the file, I don't see anything legible, and I was hoping someone had a magical way of deciphering the source file.