Is it ever safe to use a improperly closed file?

[VickyNesbitt]

Hiya

I was creating a field in a hosted file and when I went to commit my changes, it crashed and I had to force quit FileMaker... Our server basically had "a moment" - everyone had to be kicked out the server rebooted etc... However I also had open on my machine a local file which I idiotically had not backed up in several days.

This happened Friday afternoon. So now I've come in Monday morning with every intention of rebuilding the file due to the potential of corruption, however when I opened it there was no error i.e. no "this file has been improperly closed..." blah blah blah.

Does this mean it's safe to continue using or should I still rebuild??? I think there's a possibilty it might be ok as it wasn't the local file that crashed, but does this really make a difference if the application crashed?!?

Also if I have to rebuild what is safe to copy and paste or import? Normally I've recreated tables, fields and scripts from scratch and pasted layout objects after creating and resizing the layouts accordingly, but it would be good to know for definite.

Thanks in advance!

Vicky

[Matthew F]

Hi Vicky,

I suppose by now you decided what to do. I'm a little surprised that you contemplated going through so much work without more evidence of file corruption.

My impression is that the error warning that you got is just the standard OS warning that an file was not closed properly. For many apps this would mean that you have unsaved data. But Filemaker saves data continuously so there might not be much data lost, except for whatever field you were editing last.

Maybe I'm too cavalier, but I would probably not mess around with a file unless I found that it was behaving badly. I would also run Recover... Check Consistency... to see if Filemaker detected a problem. In either of these cases, I would run the the Recover function to try to have Filemaker fix the problem itself. Doing what you described - rebuilding layouts, etc., would be my last resort.