Open remote corrupts file

[westlake]

Sorry if this isn't the right spot for this question. I just stumbled on here today while searching online for some sort of idea of what is going on.

The basic setup in my office is my computer running filemaker and hosting the various files I use and one other computer running it's own version of filemaker connecting remotely to mine to access the files.

It has been working fine for years! But today, I tried to open a file remotely and it crashed Filemaker. I rebooted, it crashed again. I'm running Mac OSX on both computers. When I went back to the host computer, the file was no longer functioning. I closed it and tried to reopen it, but no dice. The file was corrupted somehow in the attempt.

I've ran the recover function and it has retained all my data, but I don't know what to do about the other computer accessing this file.

I tried once more to open remote and it again corrupted the file. Any suggestions on what to do?

I'm considering uninstalling FM on the secondary computer and reinstalling it, but I'm not sure that I need to take that step yet.

I've several other files we use the same way and they are all fine and will continue to open remote with no corruption.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!!

[Vaughan]

Unfortunately, files occasionally get corrupted. The setup you have (peer-to-peer) is done pretty well, but the ideal setup uses FM Server on a dedicated machine. This is very stable.

One reason for this is the FMS can automate the backup process. Usually after a file corruption occurrence the data from the recovered file would be imported into a known-good backup copy of the file, and the recovered file would be discarded. The recover process recovers *data" at the expense of everything else, so the resulting file might have bits of layouts or scripts missing. In a large complex solution these missing bits are difficult to spot, so the standard practice is to move the data into a known-good file for production.

[westlake]

Thanks for the reply!

I'm considering getting the FMS the next time I upgrade my program, but for now I've got to stick with what I have.

Any suggestions on what I might do to fix the immediate problem - getting the secondary computer to open the file remotely without causing further corruption?

What is confusing me is that all the other files open remote just fine, but whenever I've tried today to open remote this one file, even an older back up of this same file, it corrupts the file on the host computer.

[Vaughan]

Make sure that the file is located on the local hard disk of the computer that's acting as the host: it's bad having the file in a shared volume. Very bad.

Also make sure that the file is being shared through the Open remote command.

If the file is corrupt then it needs to be fixed. If all backups are also damaged then the file needs to be rebuilt from scratch -- avoid cut and pasting elements between files because they may copy the corruption across to the new file.

There really aren't any shortcuts.

[westlake]

Thank you so much for your help.

I do have the files on my hard drive and we are sharing via open remote. I'm going to have to do some planning on rebuilding this file from the ground up. Bleh.

[mr_vodka]

Peer to peer sharing is more risky than a file being served with FileMAker Server. Perhaps one of your users tried accessing the file through a shared network instead of using Open Remote?