I've got a bit of a huge problem here. I wrote a database for taking orders at my work. This morning, the database had a problem. One of the girls couldn't log on. It kept saying someone was already logged on from her computer. I thought someone must have Filemaker running on a different account, but no dice. I rebooted her computer and it didn't help. Still said someone was logged on. So I ran the server admin tool and tried to disconnect her from there. Still didn't work. So I shut down the database, rebooted the computer it was on and started it back up.

That solved one problem, she could log on and enter data again. But all the data that we entered yesterday was missing. It's just gone. First I though maybe we'd been entering it on a different copy of the database somehow, but we weren't. How is the data missing? Is there anything I can try to get it back? Please help me. I'm in deep troulbe if that data's just gone.

*luckily we keep a hard copy of most everything we put into the database, but my boss is still really angry right now, and I get to be the target of his wrath*

It sounds like girl's copy of FMP client crashed. It may have crashed with data still in the memory cache that was never written to disk. You should check the settings of the clients to find out how often the memory is flushed to disk. Also, do you have a backup schedule set up on the server for your databases? How frequently are they backed up? I back up every hour, and then have another scheduled script that zips the backup and copies it to 2 other hard disks and one network drive in another building. (probably overkill for me, but I'm paranoid)

Good to know about the cache, but that doesn't seem like the problem to me. The stuff I put in on my computer is missing too. I think I may have found the problem... Somebody else was on the server machine yesterday and set the machine's date back by 2 months (the guy wanted to use a shareware program he had there that had expired) and he never set it back again. I figure when I rebooted the server, the change in dates confused it somehow and it did something unexplainably weird.

Possible?

We are running FM Server 7.0v3 on a Windows 2003 Server and the other day one of the files had all the records there but all fields were blank. All the data had gone! Don't know if it is the same as our problem.

Are you using FM Server?

Luckily we get FM Server to do three backups per day so we are only a couple of hours behind as a worst case.

As we went up from FM5, we converted our multi-file system to be just multi file under v7 as well. Maybe that ensured it was just the one set of data that went. If we had everything under one file and multiple tables (as per their new model) then maybe everything would have went.