Hello Access gurus,

I'm helping out a friend who's a small business owner. The software he
uses to run his shop uses an Access backend. We recently had some huge
headaches w/DB corruption. We had to send the main mdb file back to
the vendor, who had to send it to an outside company in order to get it
fixed. When they did this, we were told that it could be days until
we'd get it back. We had a backup that was 3 days old at that point,
so my friend made the decision to restore that and have one of his
employees enter the 3 missing days worth of data. 2 days after that
(of entering more data in day-to-day business), the file was fixed and
returned to us from the vendor. I asked the vendor if our backup was
"on it's way" to corruption or could we just keep using it since we
were up and running and current. The other option is to take their
repaired file and enter the 2 days that we'd be missing. The vendor
replied that we probably had "some" corruption in our backup.

Sorry for the long winded explanation, but is it possible that the
tables are "partly" corrupted and we could get the problem again if we
don't use their repaired files, or are we just as likely to get it with
the repaired files as our backups?

Thanks everyone.

On 17 Dec 2004 19:40:22 -0800, "Matthew" <mlibhart (AT) ptd (DOT) net> wrote:

Since the vendor never inspected your backup, I would not put much
credence in their assessment that it probably had some corruption.
Perhaps they can explain how they came to that conclusion.

There is no such thing as partially corrupted. Otoh corruption can get
worse over time. For example a memo field in one record can be
corrupted, and later a memo field in another record is corrupted as
well.

Pick up the frequency of making backups, and keep several (if not
many) on hand before overwriting them.
Teach all users good database etiquette, which includes never shutting
down the workstation while in the application, and never End Process
the Access task.

-Tom.