I have used FM for some years but by no means can claim to be anything but a novice user, I just open the program and use the existing databases so I hope I can make my problem clear.

A couple of times this week when I have opened two different FM databases I have received a screen prompting me to define the database. I have never had to do this before so I responded by "cancel" to find to no data in the DB. Fortunately our data is backed up nightly so I am able to recover the missing data.

My questions are:

what would cause FM to prompt me to define an existing 8 year old database that has worked with no problems?

Do I really need to define the database when this prompt comes up or is there a way to access the database that was used with the correct data?

Thanks in advance!

That is typical behaviour when creating a NEW database. Is it possible that you are actually creating a new database rather than opening an existing database? It could also be possible that you accidentially overwrote your existing database with a new blank database.

I am not opening a new database, at least not intentionally. I am simply using the program to access an exisisting one.

To my knowledge we are not overwriting existing databases. This has happened 3x time week with 2 different databases. When we close out of the database we use the program function to close it and then shut down the program. Is there someway we are inadvertantly overwriting our data?