Access 2000 - Missing Records

[Brian Faichney]

Hi,

I've become involved in a situation where a user claims that data from her
Access 2000 database has been deleted. The user was getting her PC
re-installed. Several Access databases were copied to a share on a Win2000
server. After re-installing, the databases were copied back. However, the
table is still there but it contains no records. She also claims that there
used to be a form, but it too is missing.

I'm not convinced that the data was there in the first place because when I
add a new record, the auto number field starts counting from 1 (had there
been data I would expected the counter to start from the last value+1). If
the copying process had caused corruption I'd have expected to see an
"Unrecognised database format" type error message when opening the database.
I've used Access for a number of years and haven't come upon a situation
like this before.

Has anyone else experienced a similar situation? I don't expect to be able
to recover the data (the copy on the Win2000 server is also devoid of data,
so any file corruption must have occured during the initial copy to the
server) but is there any way (say, using Access's system tables) to
determine if the table has ever contained records, when they were deleted
etc? I know there is no built-in transaction log function.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Brian Faichney
Desktop Support Team Leader
NHS Fife.

 

[TC]

Tough question! This is all I can think of:

- The wrong database was baced-up in the first place (obvious).

- Access applications are often designed with a "front tne/back end"
structure, The BE contains the tables (but nothing else). The FE contains
the queries, forms, reports, macros & modules. The FE has links to the
actual tables in the BE. Perhaps only one (not both) of those were copied.

- Deleteing all the records from a table & then compacting the db, will
reset the autonumber to 1.

I'm always skeptical when someone says, "there was data there yesterday, but
it has disappeared!". Often the truth of the matter is more like: "Jane told
me that Fred was going to enter the data last month, but I just looked
today, & it's not there!" The missing >form< seems a bit more suspicious, to
me. That suggests, to me, that the db in question is >not< a copy of the
original one - it is a different db - perhaps a development version?

So, perhaps the question is this: how do you know that the >correct< db was
copied originally?

HTH,
TC