[RESOLVED] Can't understand what happened with database

[chelseamorris]

How to be pats? My dbf file yesterday evening was fine. Today it has opened with message...Visual FoxPro not a table error upon opening DBF file. I use Visual FoxPro 9. I'm novice database admin, and I haven't seen such messages before. One of my colleagues recommended appealing to help on a database forum.

[digitalShaman]

isnt foxpro quite outdated?
anyhow, it sounds like your database file got corrupted. look out for some repair Tools or functions in your foxpro package. do a backup of the corrupted file before you run the repair function as sometimes These repairs do even worse...
good luck.

[Henfost]

There is a method below, it is operated via MS Excel. Another way to fix dbf might Google search query for special instruments - there you may find this one guide and others.

Try opening the .dbf file in Excel or other program that supports opening the .dbf format.
Once opened in Excel you should be able to view the file, delete any "bad data", and resave to a new name (with the .dbf extension).
Also possible to create a new table with the structure of the old table, append records from the old to the new. May salvage records until the corruption is encountered.

[chelseamorris]

I don't have enough experience in searching for solutions or articles on the Internet. But I had to use some search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and what I dug up there... https://onlinefile.repair/en/dbf.html - as I found out from contacts of this resource, group of programmers created it, but I'm afraid of doing it immediately, because it is new thing for me. What opinion do you have about this masterpiece? Can I use it for my case? If someone applied it, share your thoughts how it works and how much it might be effective.

Unfortunately, I didn't find any resolutions from Microsoft - I can't realize why such huge corporation doesn't care about safety of data of their customers like me, like you. This question for me now doesn't have an answer. If someone owns this information, inform me, please.

I wasted several valuable hours of my spare time and I've no idea who or what could return me these very hours. Pats, I hope this time or next time you'll be more sympathetic to problems of strangers on your community.

[FunkyDexter]

I can't realize why such huge corporation doesn't care about safety of data

The only person responsible for your data is you. And hopefully you've just learned your first and most important lesson as a DBA: Take regular back ups and test restoring them to make sure the backup itself isn't corrupted. As a DBA You own the data and You are responsible for this. Sorry to be harsh but the cost of not learning this lesson now could be huge later in your career.

As for what you do now - the first thing yo need to do is track down the .bak file. It will probably be in the same directory as the .dbf file. This is the last auto-generated backup file and may still be recoverable. You can run a restore package on it to see if it will rebuild it for you. I can't make a recommendation as to which to use so you'll just have to try a few and see how you get on. But take a copy of both the corrupted dbf file and the bak file first. This is your best and easiest way of recovering but is not guaranteed.

If that fails thank your lucky stars your using fox pro because it's files are basically stored as hex representations of the text they contain. That means you've got a fighting chance of manually fixing the corruption using a hex editor. Here's a link that will probably be a huge help in doing that. It will be tedious and potentially a lot of work but I'm afraid you haven't got any other choices that I'm aware of. And again take copies first.