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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Loss of databases, tables, operations.

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    #1

    Loss of databases, tables, operations.

    In all the years I have been working with Alpha Software, I have never lost complete databases, tables or operations. (0r the equivalents in Alpha 4) I had a database program in A5 for entering sales information. It has worked perfectly for 5 months. I had operations for exporting the collected data to Excell and that had worked perfectly for the same 5 months. All of the tables, forms and operations were there for each of the the five months of the system's use. I had entered October data thru the 17th of the month and closed the system as usual. When I opened the system last Friday to update the system with data to Oct. 22nd, everything was gone. What might I have done to completely kill the database and data. I've undoubtedly lost the database and all of the data but would like some clues as to what to watch for in the future in order to avoid future loss of data in A5.
    Tags: None
    #2
    RE: Loss of databases, tables, operations.

    What pieces were left?

    Could you open the application?

    Have you explored the database folder to see which files are missing?

    I ask these things cause it's not possible to tell from your description whether literally "everything" has been wiped from disk, or whether some or all of the application has become inaccessible to you.

    -- t

    Comment

      #3
      RE: Loss of databases, tables, operations.

      Tom, Thanks for your reponse.

      As I stated in my first post, the Database, tables, operations, forms, every reference to the program are gone. I have searched for every aspect of the program and cannot locate anything. I have used the Search program with no success.

      With A4. we could look at the files but I don't know how to do that with Windows.

      Best regards. Bob

      Comment

        #4
        RE: Loss of databases, tables, operations.

        Windows Explorer is a utility provided by Microsoft. Using it you can browse the folders on your hard drive, looking for the folder in which you created your database. "Folder" is the Windows' name for a "Directory".

        You can also use the "File Find" utility to search a drive or folder using a filename & wildcard. It's available to you by pressing the Start button.

        If these are foreign concepts to you I suggest you ask your local tech support person for a some coaching.

        Your messages have not been clear on a key point.

        1) Are you saying all the files you are looking for are wiped off the hard drive?

        OR

        2) Are you saying that after you start Alpha Five you cannot find the database?

        These are very different questions.

        -- tom

        Comment

          #5
          RE: Loss of databases, tables, operations.

          Robert,

          Here is one thing I can think of:

          In some cases, for example if you want to compact your database, but also if you want to backup your database, it can occur for some reason that any table is still open.

          Alpha will then rather modestly ask you if you want to drop the table.......
          When you are in a hurry, or just somewhere else with your thoughts, so it might happen that you answer "yes" by just clicking ahead in a routine way.
          Alpha then drops the table and thus all forms and operations belonging to that table will have gone too.
          This might have happened to you.

          Of course I will not point at backups/restore because I feel you already know that, you probably did have a good backup and just wanted to learn what happened and how to prevent this from happening again.

          Kind regards,

          Marcel

          Comment

            #6
            RE: Loss of databases, tables, operations.

            Marcel is correct. And... if this is what happened the table and its dictionaries would still be present in the database folder. All you would require is to 'add' the table back to the database once its opened again.

            The same sort of thing could appear to happen if you move the database to a new machine using a CD-ROM. Often the CD will mark each file readonly and that attribute remains set when the files are copied back to a hard disk. Resetting the attributes for each file to read/write solves this.

            However, the threshold question remains. Are the files still on disk (but invisible to Alpha Five), OR, are they not present on disk.

            -- t

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