Lost some Data-- any way to recover?

[Johhhn]

Hi,

Filemaker Server 9 running on Leopard

Machine was unresponsive, etc., so restarted it (forced shutdown on the G5)

Found out today (1 week later) that some data is missing that was entered on that day and the previous day.

Any ideas how to get this data back?

[Fitch]

Have you checked your backups?

[Johhhn]

yup..

too recent :

i have 4 rotating backups, but none from when/before the incident happened.

Anybody seen this happen before?

[Vaughan]

"Anybody seen this happen before?"

Yes. It's expected behaviour.

The correct process is to close the files (it can take minutes to hours to close the files so be patient and don't assume something is wrong) then stop the service, then restart the machine.

[Johhhn]

why would it lose so much data?

i believe it was last weds., that i had to force restart the machine..

but it lost data that was entered on tuesday!!

this is normal?

[Vaughan]

I don't know about losing data from Tuesday, but for performance al lot of data is cached in RAM between the disk and the NIC. FMS 9 allows huge RAM caches, hundreds of MBs. This cache is progressively flushed back to disk, but if the server is killed before this occurs fully, data will be lost and/or the records will be left in an incomplete state (corruption).

It's possible that an older record was damaged in the process.

Did you try saving the files as a compressed copy?

[Johhhn]

yup, no luck in doing that..

the cache should have been flushed many times before i had to do a force restart--

also,, a script i created is also missing!

just vanished!

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Your files were almost certainly damaged [color:red]before the shutdown happened. I think you'll likely want to review your processes for server configuration and administration.

Steven