Products deleted but ref codes are still there - caused crash?

[Charlylingo]

I have just had a bit of a nightmare with V8 - inputting two new products which then seemed to disappear when I next went into the system. Thinking perhaps I had not clicked apply changes, I then input them again only to find that when I clicked on the marketing tab the whole system crashed. Got an error code mfc71.dll (catalog.exe - system has to shut down).
The upshot of all this is that I have had to reinstall Actinic which has ironed out the inputting problem, and cut the two new products out completely but when I went into marketing to add related products I can see the product reference codes for these products are still there. So I am wondering - perhaps the reason for the crash is that Actinic did not know what to do and had a coding error because these product refs are still floating around somewhere in the background.

So does anyone know how you get into the database side of things to get rid of old product refs?? Has this happened to anyone else? I wondered about Purge Content but did not want to touch that side of things as I don't know what it does.

Can I also say to anyone new to Actinic - make sure you take a Snapshot every day in case your system crashes as I had not taken one for a couple of weeks and regretted it!!

[leehack]

Purge content will just get rid of anything you have marked for deletion. I would suggest trying a compact database in the housekeeping menu, that will probably solve it.

With regards to snapshots, if you are currently working on it and making changes, you want to be taking one before and after you do the work. I will often take 10-20 per day when working heavily on a site and they will ALL be named differently.

Let us know if that solves your problem anyway.

[Charlylingo]

Thanks for advice - it worked!

Hi there - thanks for your advice - this worked and no problems since. Now taking snapshots every 5 minutes - I learnt my lesson.