I have a file that finds a phantom record. This partial file consists of personnel record, some of which are volunteers. If I go to the Volunteer Data (use button) and search for a volunteer ID number 8925, I get 2 records, one of which is a blank (phantom) record with question marks in most of the fields. The other record is the correct one. The total record count is 203; if I delete the phantom record, the correct record appears and the record count is still 203. This does not occur for all records, and I have only identified this one record so far. NOTE All records below 5001 are blanks.

Can anyone tell me what is happening here?

User Name: John Password: 123

Running on a Mac OS 10.6

TAZ Copy Copy.fp7.zip

It is sign of major corruption but I proceeded with fix attempt anyway ...

1) When I Check Consistency, it says that the privileges are damaged.

2) When I run recovery in FMPA (and select repair index only), it doesn't resolve the issue.

3) When I run full Recover, it says it finds no problems but the problems are gone.

Conclusion: This file is corrupt and has probably taken a major hit. The worst damage can occur when the file is served and it was improperly closed or the file is accessed improperly from a network server. To figure out why it happened, how is it being served?

Action suggested: You can run full recovery on this file, take a good clean clone from your backups (which has never crashed) and import your data into it (do not 'perform auto-enter' during import and remember to reset your serials to the next number. There are many references on good recovery process; just Google search 'FileMaker corruption.'

I'm sorry you had this happen, John. Oh, and I don't think it is good idea to post up a file with real data in it, particularly about contacts. Please remove the file and replace with empty Contacts table. :)

Thanks La Retta but to clarify, this file is being shared peer to peer over a network. My user is a non-prof, and cannot afford a server at this time. What precautions should I give them to reduce the chance of this happening again?

... this file is being shared peer to peer over a network

The term "peer to peer" means that the files is shared using a copy of FMP instead of FM Sever and are accessed through the Open remote command, not by double-clicking on the file icon. My guess is that the file is stored on a shared network volume because that's how most files get shared.

The "precautions" are to get it off the shared volume an onto a dedicated computer running FMP or FMS.