Supertech said:
The file is an important file, the last bu is dated JAN 06.
Let's be honest. Look at the calendar. Your last backup was close to a year
ago. *Important* files get backed up daily (except maybe weekends), so if
you don't have about 200 backups since then it means you didn't decide the
file was important until *after* you discovered it was corrupted. So it
wasn't important, and it's not valuable either if it's not worth $299 to
recover it.
You're hoping somebody will take pity on you and offer to recover this file
for you with their own recovery tool they bought. Unfortunately you're
asking the wrong crowd because the developers who answer questions in the
newsgroups religiously back up their work, so if files get corrupted and they
can't import into a new file or JetComp can't fix it, they restore from
backup. They don't need to buy recovery tools, so they can't use *theirs* to
recover your file.
That said, I'll take pity on you under two conditions:
1) You make a list of *all* your important files and start backing them up
daily or at least every day they're changed, and backup your computer either
weekly or monthly too so this never happens again, and
2) Your zipped file is small enough that I won't be sitting here till next
Tuesday waiting for it to download. I usually limit files to 5 MB, but my
inbox can handle files a little bigger.
If the recovery company only charged you $22 it's probably a very small file,
but I want to mention my other limitations too. I can only recover table
structures and data, so if you didn't split your database, that's another
lesson this disaster will teach you. I won't charge you anything; neither
will I guarantee I can recover anything because it sounds like you tried to
compact/repair the file yourself a few times and the recovery company
couldn't do much with what was left. For future reference, if Access warns
you that the file needs to be repaired, immediately stop what you're doing
and make a copy of the file, keep it in a safe place and never open it again.
Just make copies of it so if the new copy goes up in smoke you can start over
with another copy of the original.
The corrupted
file was updated many times past that point, but only with numeric fields
increasing or decreasing in value in exsisting fields, and new records
inserted into the exsisting file structure.
Let me see if I can translate that into English. You haven't changed the
table structures, but you updated some of the records that existed in Jan.
2006. You also added more records since the last backup. Please correct me
if I'm wrong, because "updated ... but only with numeric fields increasing or
decreasing in value in exsisting fields" translated into English might also
mean you *have* changed the table structures since the last backup by adding
new columns. These new columns are number data types and the tables aren't
normalized, so new column names take the format of Sales_2005, Sales_2006,
Sales_2007, etc.
If I was able to know what records or fields are corrupted or unreadable in
the bad file, I could resurrect at least some of the info I need.
That's what the recovery company was supposed to do for you, but if you gave
them the corrupted file *after* you compacted/repaired it yourself, there
might not be much to recover.
If the
recent corrupted file has the structure in disarray, and good records, then
we can use both these files to the goal. Does that make sense?
Yes, but tools like that are at the *high* end, and if you aren't willing to
buy them you can't expect me to either. I'll see what I can do. I would
need the last backup and the corrupted file (I'm hoping it's from *before*
you repaired it). For comparison I'd like to see what the recovery company
recovered, but it's not required. What are the zipped sizes of these
separate files? You can compact a copy of the last backup, then zip it if
that helps reduce the size.
