Lost Data

[mhmorris]

I am not familiar with Peachtree Accounting, but I serve as one of our office's computer tech folks. Yesterday, one of our companies had all of its data disappear for 2002. (we are currently trying to restore it from our server backup, but that has been an off-topic nightmare). As it was, this problem happened with a different company three weeks ago, but we managed to restore the data from our server's backup.

so, does anyone know why??? the data disappeared like that? And what can we do to prevent that in the future?

Any suggestions are most appreciated... MT

[Robert Walraven]

Do you mean the company files actually vanished from the system? Nothing in Peachtree would do that.

If that isn't what happened, can you be more specific about what you mean by "vanished"?

[dringstrom]

In addition to Robert's question, please advise what version of Peachtree and what operating system. Is Peachtree installed on a network? We're glad to provide specific answers when we're provided with specific information, otherwise we can only offer general answers that may or may not resolve the issue.

Another practice that you should implement immediately is to back up Peachtree every day, if not two or three times a day. For this purpose, using the Backup command on the File menu to store a PTB file on your hard drive will suffice. You still want to continue any backups that you're performing with removeable media. In any case, in a situation where you're having data problems, you can't back up too often. The more backups that you have , the more recovery options you have.

[mhmorris]

The Peachtree version is the Complete Accounting, version 7. We run Windows 98 as our operating system. The software is saved on the individual computers, but the data itself is saved to a central server. The particular company where we lost the data (as in, there was data entered in March, but now the data is completely gone. No sign of it in the company anywhere) is shared by three users. Our nonprofit has a policy of not saving any data to the computer hard drives - all data has to be saved to the central server which is then backed up nightly on a data tape.

[dringstrom]

Let me clarify that my suggestion to back up on your hard drive is an additional layer of backing up. Obviously, you'd keep backing up to your tapes. However, it's a major pain to restore from a tape. If you keep temporary backups on a hard drive, restoring only takes a minute or two. Since you appear to be having difficult times, saving temporary back-ups to a hard drive can help you keep things moving along much faster when you encounter problems.

Now, by data missing, are you saying that you'd entered sales invoices, for instance, in the month of January, and now, in the month of January, there's no data? Are you looking in the right accounting period? Pardon the seemingly obvious question, but by chance, did someone roll the accounting period forward, making it appear the transactions are gone? Further, if you run a general ledger for all of 2002, you're saying there's no transactions?

If the data is truly gone, your best recourse is to restore from a backup. Did you do any thing like close the fiscal year or purge recently?

Finally, are you using Peachtree 7.03 or 7.04? Click Help, About Peachtree to double-check.

[mhmorris]

Thanks for the advice. We've decided just to restore the data from the backup tape, and then set up the program to do a backup to the hard drive.

However, this still doesn't let me know why the data just disappeared. We are looking in the right accounting period (double checked). Also, we ran a general ledger for 2002 and there are no transactions. No one purged or closed a fiscal year either.

We are using Peachtree 7.0.02

Mary

[dringstrom]

I've never seen a case where data just vanished, so I can't offer any guidance on why it happened. I can say that you're missing a patch for your version of Peachtree. You should be using either version 7.03 or 7.04. There is also a registry update on the Peachtree web site that you should install. You can download these from

http://www.peachtree.com/html/updates_available.cfm

Good luck!

[Deborah Bean]

One of the backup solutions we set up on our clients' servers (in addition to a daily tape or CD backup) is a quick Windows Batch file that can be created to run invisibly on the server and back up hourly, daily, and weekly to a secondary (backup only) hard drive. Most clients run on the two-week version of this and the files are backed up to the secondary hard drive on the server to folders named Hourly1, Hourly2, Daily1, Daily2, Weekly1, Weekly2.

One the occassions where Peachtree has fouled up or Windows has performed some quirky error, restoring the files is a 2-minute fix to delete the bad Peachtree folder, and then drag and drop one of the existing folders.

In addition to the speed of the restoration is the beauty of being able to actually access these backups to view the information to decide which to restore.

We STRONGLY suggest that this be done to a secondary hard drive. In one instance, the main hard drive crashed and the client was able to work off the secondary hard drive while waiting for the warranty people to install the new hard drive. Luckily, the client only lost the amount of time to diagnose the problem and open the other company.

Interestingly enough, this method can be used to store not only the Peachtree files, but also ANY additional files and folders on the server AND workstations. All you need is a big enough hard drive.

If you don't understand how to set up this operation, email me.

[Robert Walraven]

To answer your question about how the data disappeared: most likely it didn't. That is, there is a good chance that all the data is still in your Btrieve files but you simply can't access some of it through Btrieve calls (which is what Peachtree does.)

A simplistic analogy is this: suppose a piece of the directory for one of your disk drive gets corrupted in a way that it looks like it ends at the point of corruption. Then all of the file names that were in the directory beyond the corruption point would appear to disappear, but they are still on your disk, although they may get overwritten by subsequent operations. Records can disappear in a Btrieve file file in the same way since the files have something called a B-Tree that serves a similar role to the directory on a disk - that is, it is a mechanism for locating specific records.

I presume that what is really missing are journal records, since the data files for the journals are what get corrupted most often in Peachtree. I would not be suprised if you were to find that any customers you entered during the period in question were still there, since customer data is stored in its own file.

We have examined corrupted files from a number of customers and have found, in general, that there isn't much hope of doing some simple repair, so your only recourse at this point is to restore from your last good backup and re-enter everything from that point on. BTW, what we do is a Peachtree backup every day to a unique file and then copy that file to another computer, so we
can easily restore the data for any day.

One of the problems with the way Peachtree is designed is that it is pretty sensitive to data corruption. The corruption is not created by Peachtree itself but is almost always the result of a stressed system or fauty network hardware. Peachtree has no built-in mechanism for backing up files while it is working on them and it does not validate records after they have been created or modified.

We are working on a tool to remedy some of these problems. At the top level it will monitor the health of the data files, automatically keep a good backup, and notify you the moment a problem is detected. In addition we are working on techniques to repair corrupted files. What is interesting about the Btrieve internals is that there are two copies of some of the data, so even if the primary record gets wiped out, there is a chance that the information can be recovered.

Currently we are looking for help with this tool. We desperately need corrupted Peachtreedata files to analyze. I know that you have already restored some older data, but if you backed up the corrupted data we would really like to take a look at it and try to identify exactly what is wrong.