Data corruption: Detection, prevention, elimination & removal

[Doug Janowicz]

Sorry, Robert.  I hadn't had a chance to check the qna list for a while.
I've read your posts about data corruption, and "network error, data
garbled".  I had this problem late last year.

The problem, as best I can tell for me, was a network hardware problem with
my server computer.  This computer (a G4 tower) was hooked up to our
in-house network with an ethernet connection, but the connection was through
an aftermarket PCI ethernet card, instead of the standard motherboard
ethernet port.  (That port, among other hardware in my network, was fried by
a lightning hit years ago coming through my cable modem internet
connection).  On OS 9 (using Butler), the card worked fine, but the
conversion to Enterprise and OS X caused me intermittent problems that tore
my hair out!  I suspect the OS X driver for the card was not quite "right".

Moving my server to another computer eliminated the problems, and my shared
databases have been fine for months.  I have even reintroduced the offending
G4 tower back into the network as a client, but I'm using an Airport card to
do the networking.  There have been no problems.

Detection?  I was doing what you were doing, selecting different fields that
got corrupted with garbage, knowing that most of the records will have one
or two particular values in that field.

Prevention?  How do you prevent a hardware problem?  Buy new computers?
Apple will certainly subscribe to that!  You're on your own, here.

Elimination?  I was able to simply delete the garbled records from my
databases, and recreate them from older backup copies.  My databases deal
with invoicing, inventory, customers, etc., so this was just looking for
missing invoice numbers, item numbers, and the like.  No fun.

Bottom line, load your server software and databases onto another computer.
It's not Jim's software that is causing this.

Doug Janowicz
Easton, PA