Damaged Company File

Problem

File is damaged-- by bad hard disk sector, data overwrite, some other file problem.

Diagnosis

User of Goldenseal small business software reports that company file is damaged. They ran the Verify File command and it reports errors.

Many "file length" or "failed validation" errors.

If they haven't run Verify File, have them run View--Security--Verify File. It will give helpful info.

Solution

HAVE THEM SEND US THE FILE! We may be able to rescue their data, and it will help us to diagnose the problem and prevent it in the future.

Do they have a recent backup? If so, restoring from that is an easy solution. If not, the file rescue is more urgent.

If there is just one record damaged, they may be able to delete it. However we can do a better job of deciding how to make the repair if we can see the file here.

They should not just continue using a damaged file. The damaged record may cause worse problems later.

BACKGROUND-- we have many "fail safe" tests built into the Goldenseal business management software, so it will usually give error messages long before the damage is hopeless. If we can see the file we can usually identify which data is bad, and how it got that way.

If users really want to diagnose the problem, go to View--Security--Database Report. You can look at the raw data in the damaged record. Starting in 2.8 we write the class ID, record ID and write date at the end of every record. That means if there was data overwrite within Goldenseal, you can identify what did it.

NOTE-- We saw 6 damaged files in 2003, and only 1 so far in 2004. Every file give us some info that helps us to prevent damage in the future. However even with perfect programming, there will still be occasional file damage due to hard disk head crashes, data bits changed by radiation, corrupted file tables, etc.

Comments

Entered 7/27/04 by Dennis. Updated 11/5/2010.