backup? 77 records all the same

[glenwf]

Posted earlier, but no response. This is a possible good reason to discuss backups and retrieving old versions if possible.

What could have caused almost all 77 records in a simple database to contain
the information in the first record, that information in the first record
replacing all the information in almost all the other records? The
remaining 10 records were copies of a random record.

I didn't notice it for a while and I couldn't even use BackupBuddy to
retrieve the old good version. All my backups were not recent enough. Not
sure when of how this happened, but I used the database about a month ago.

Palm OS v.5.2.8 on a Palm Zire 31.
WindowsXP Pro,
HandBase v.v4.1.0, Desktop HandBase Pro 4.1 Build R2

No help for this one, but is there something I can do to prevent this from
happening again. And, if it does, is there a way to get back the old
version before corruption?

[ddhsoftwareadmin]

Hi,

I hope you don't mind- I moved your topic to the Palm OS platform as it's more appropriate here. I'm not sure why the 77 records all the same thing happened- I have never heard of that happening. I'm wondering if the 76 other records are actually just missing some important information and the program is just displaying the previous record in it's place. Not likely, but I'd be curious to know. Feel free to email me the database file if it's not private information.

In regards to a backup- have you synced with your PC in the last 30 days? If so, the HanDBase conduit keeps backups of every sync (up to a maximum of 10 by default but can be changed in the configuration), both desktop and handheld versions. You can find those here:

c:\program files\Palm\Username\HanDBase\Backup
where c:\program files\palm is the path to your Palm desktop and Username is your Palm UserName (abbreviated).

Take a look and you should see files renamed to show the date and other information about the file to make it obvious from which it came!

[BruceArnold]

I had something similar happen just recently -- information in one record replaced information in all previous records, but those entered more recently were unchanged. This was on a Tungsten E.

I suspect -- suspect, mind you -- that it had something to do with moving some of the related databases to a memory card. I had not used a card with HanDBase before, and was experimenting with freeing up some memory on the Palm. Since I moved the related databases back to the "device" memory, it has not recurred.

Fortunately, I keep copies of critical data and it was no problem to replace the corrupted files.

I don't know if this has anything to do with glenwf's problem or not. I'm not even sure it has anything to do with mine. But the deal with the memory card seems un-coincidental.

[dhaupert]

As a followup to this one- I have been working with Glen on the problem he was having and we tracked it down to BackupBuddy.

Normally when a conduit exists for a Palm app, the backup conduit does not interfere with the databases for that application, but in the case of BackupBuddy it still touches and backs up the databases for apps that have a conduit. When this was disabled, the problem was solved.

He was using 1.x of BackupBuddy and v2.x has a feature where you can tell it to skip all databases of a certain type. I recommended he upgrade to that version and try that option out. Hopefully that does the trick!