Lost data nightmare - Advice Needed

[Jeremy]

This may be hopeless, but if anyone can suggest a solution to this problem I would much appreciate it:

I have a database containing approximately 10,500 products in six main sections, with each section containing dozens of sub-sections. The file-size of the database is 900Mb or so.

Whilst trying to 'move' one of the main sections, so as to change the order in which they appeared, Actinic crashed. On re-starting it I realised that the section I was moving had disappeared. I have examined the database in Access and all the data for that section has vanished entirely (I had hoped it was still there but just not appearing, but no, the data has actually been delected from the database).

My problem is that my backup file is 18 days old, which means that if I restore using this database I will get back the missing section, but there will be major errors where things have changed elsewhere over the last couple of weeks.

So I have two databases - one is up-to-date but has a section missing completely, whilst the other one is older but complete. Can anyone suggest a practical way of extracting the missing section from the 'old' database and inserting it into the 'new' one? Any help would be much appreciated.

As an aside, the reason why my backup is 18 days old is that, following advice on this forum, I generally 'end the day' by compacting my database, which of course also closes Actinic. I hadn't appreciated that this doesn't back the data up, and that I should spend another couple of minutes to go back and and re-open Actinic in order to close it again using the 'Backup' button.

Many thanks

Jeremy
www.magazineexchange.co.uk

[fergusw]

You could copy and paste, in access, from your old database product and section tables into your new database product and section table, HOWEVER, you would have to be confident that:
1. The sectionID's were consistent across both databases
2. You were only copying the products from the missing section(s) and this would require possible ordering the products by nSectionID column?
3. This would only be simple as long as there were not associated permutations/choices with these products as these reside in yet another table..

Even the above would mean that the missing section would still be 'old' data.

Would it not be simpler to restore to the 18 days old backup and fix/update subsequent changes? Even following the above may result in a lot of additional work on the sections/products that are pasted across.

[Jeremy]

Thanks for the suggestion regarding doing it in Access; I suspected this would be possible but, although I do use Access (rather than Actinic) when I need to do 'bulk updates' to my database, I would be very nervous trying to do what you suggest as I've never really understood how all the Access tables interact - I suspect it would all go horribly wrong if I attempted it.

However, I am delighted to say that I have found a solution myself which, although not perfect, is infinitely better than simply restoring to my old back-up and then trying to manually re-do all the modifications that have occured over the last 18 days.

In Developer I created a 'new' licenced site that contained the data from my old back-up. I then simply copied the appropriate section, then switched in Actinic to my current site (ie the one which is up-to-date but is missing a section). As this can be done without exiting from Actinic, it is then possible to 'paste' the section into the new site. As this section contains hundreds if not thousands of products I am very impressed that a simple 'cut'n'paste' can handle it, but it can. The only downside is that the product reference numbers in that section have changed. Since I use these as in my stock-control system, this is a real nuisance but I can get round it by keeping the old back-up as a second site, and refering to this for the product numbers.

If anyone from Actinic is reading this - congratulations on the power of the cut'n'paste feature, but please a) do something about the crashes that occur when moving large catalogue sections (this has happened to me several times before today, albeit without the data-loss) and b) add a warning message so that users understand that a compacted database still needs to be backed-up.

Jeremy

[Jan]

If you are using your product references in external systems I would recommend switching off the autogenerate product reference option and entering your own. If you want to change the ones in that section back to their old values you can switch autogenerate product references off and then manually change them back to what they were.

Regards,

[Jeremy]

Thanks for that Jan. I will think about doing that, but due to the very large number of products in that section, re-filing them all may take longer than simply refering to two different databases. It also occurs to me that, whichever approach I use, I will get conflicts with two products 'sharing' the same product number.

Jeremy