Data Disappears

[MomO3]

I spent several hours entering and updating data in my Access program
yesterday. All data appeared to be saved as it appeared in report totals at
the end of my data entry session. However, after quitting Access and
restarting, the data is missing. It is no longer showing up in reports, and
if I look directly at the table data it is not there either. If I were
working with a full database, it would be as if it had done a rollback, or
conversely, I had not "committed" the changes.

This did happen to me one time before where Access seemed to accumlate
changes, only to disregard them when shutting down. I had to export the
database and re-import to get it to properly save changes again. Just doing
the Compact and Repair did nothing. There are no visible error messages when
Access stops accepting changes. I do have my frontend forms and reports
separate from my backend data, though both are sitting on my PC in the same
directory.

Thank you for any light you can shed. BTW, appologies for any cross-posting.
I had trouble with this form giving me an error message yesterday and didn't
think it had actually posted the question.

 

[Allen Browne]

When you described this yesterday, you said that you confirmed that the data
*was* in the table, but after re-opening the database it is no longer there.
The most likely cause would be that your database is now connected to a
different back end.

You say this is a split database, so the tables are in a separate back end.
Often when we are developing, we make multiple backup copies. It's easy to
either open the wrong front end, or to re-connect to the wrong back end. My
money is on the data being in another file somewhere.

There are other ways that data can seem to disappear. For example, if you
enter data into a subform when the main form is at a related record, it does
go into the subform's table, but it never shows up in the main form again
(because the null foreign key never matches any record loaded into the main
form.)

Another case is where you have the form's Data Entry property set to Yes.
This property indicates that you want to use the form only for entering new
data, so none of the existing records show.

Another possiblity is that the form (or subform) is filtered in such as way
that the records don't show. If you are using Access 2007, you may need to
set the form's FilterOnLoad property to No.