My Mac running OS 9.2.2 froze while performing the Today Calculation of
a file (using FMPro 6). When I opened the file, received the "Database
needs to be rebuilt" message, so performed the rebuild. Message cam
back saying all was ok, no data lost etc. When I reopen the file, I
noticed that field access had been limited for some users that was not
limited before. When I investigated, I found that the rebuild had
added the letter "a" after the name of some of the fields. Of course
any data that was in the field is no longer available.

Any ideas? Of course I do have back ups to revert to - but the fact
that it has done this worries me, and is shaking my confidence in the
application.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Walt.

In article <1132591673.830046.235210 (AT) g43g2000cwa (DOT) googlegroups.com>,
waltw (AT) careermanagement (DOT) com says...
When filemaker crashes hard it the database can be damaged.

When filemaker asks a file to be recovered, that means that its detected
that the file has crashed.

The recovery operation is *not* like, for example, the OS9 "Disk Scan"
that occurs after an OS crash. Recovery is intended to get the database
into a consistent enough state to get as much data as possible out of
it; it is not intended that you continue using the file.

(Often the file will be ok, and you can use it with no side effects, but
that is just a happy occurence, not something you can or should rely
on.)

When FM crashes, if you have backups revert to them. If the backups are
older, you can hopefully export most of the data from the recovered
file. That's really all that its for.

-regards,
dave

In article <1132591673.830046.235210 (AT) g43g2000cwa (DOT) googlegroups.com>, "Walt"
<waltw (AT) careermanagement (DOT) com> wrote:

Two obeservations. The first is strong agreement with 42. Take a copy of
your best backup, delete all records. Then use Recover to open the bad
version. As soon as it is as open as it's going to get, import all data
into your empty clone. Do not put a Recovered file back into production.

The second observation is about the Today function. This is a very badly
designed function (in FM 6 & earlier, anyway). It caused me no end of
grief until a couple of years ago someone here pointed out that the Status
function Status(CurrentDate) does exactly the same thing, but much more
easily, quicker, and with far less chance of freezing things up. Since
then I've been combing through my huge solution hunting down Todays and
replacing them with the Status version. After two years, I'm still
finding them!

Quite simply, Today should never be used at all.

Steve Brown