New Recovery Options

[Steven H. Blackwell]

The Recovery Function and the Consistency Check remain in the new FileMaker® Pro 10 much as they did in FileMaker® Pro 9, but with some highly useful and important modifications and additions.

A totally new feature in FileMaker Pro 10’s Recovery options is the ability to bypass a start-up script or layout that might be causing a file to crash. A frequent cause of this unwanted behavior is a corrupted graphic on the splash screen or an opening script stuck in an infinite loop. Provided that a developer or administrator has a [Full Access] account for the file, he or she can invoke this option. This will bypass the start-up script and take the developer to a newly created blank layout.

Another particularly compelling new feature in FileMaker Pro 10 is the ability to order a Consistency Check on a closed file on demand. After the check is completed, results are reported back by FileMaker Pro. Depending on the size and complexity of the file, this can take some time to complete.

When the process has been completed, two things will happen. First, FileMaker Pro 10 will return a report of the results of the action. Second, FileMaker Pro 10 will also write out information about the results of Consistency Check to a Recover Log created in the same folder as the databases. If such a log previously existed, the new information is appended to the original log. Pay careful attention to that log. It contains a great deal of valuable information. One of the best features of the log is that it generated in a tab-delimited format. Therefore, developers can easily import it directly into FileMaker Pro for review and analysis.

These are welcome changes and additions.

Steven