Smitty, for what its worth, here's my experience:
I've had a couple of situations where either some previously unknown
corruption in the database was made worse by auto compacting or the "compact
on close" process itself failed, leaving the database in a bad state. I was
fortunate in that I didn't lose anything; however, because of those close
calls, (and also because of my particular dislike of retyping code) I've
adopted a different view of the compact on close feature and now rarely use
it unless the application is totally replaceable with little or no risk of
loss (as in, for example, a production copy of the front end of a split
database).
My experiences made me realize how the compact on close feature exposes
greater potential for object/code loss for me as a developer and data loss
for my users. Now, instead of using compact on close, I instruct my users
to do compacting as a part of a formal periodic maintenance procedure and I
also instruct them to create a backup copy before compacting.
Using the compact on close feature might save you some time and effort right
now but if the day ever comes when you suffer irretrievable code or data
loss following an auto compact, you'll be wishing you had a backup. Taking
the extra time to back your database up before compacting is like insurance
that just might pay off some day.
"smitty mittlebaum" <sm****@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:cb**********@newsreader02.ops.uunet.co.za...
I have a strange problem that has reared its ugly head in the last few
weeks.
I have the option "Compact on Close" (Tools, Options, General tab)
enabled on my development machine. I did this because every time I
worked on my app it just grew and grew.
What started out as a 14Meg file kept growing into a monster of over 90
Megs!
System info:
Windows XP Pro with SP1
Office XP Pro with Frontpage
Office XP Dev Ed (We bought the Developer Edition of Office XP)
All three service packs for the Office above.
512 Megs RAM
5 Gigs of free uncompressed disk space where the MDB file is located.
OK - here's the problem: after about 4 days, sometimes less, I can no
longer use the MDB file. It becomes corrupt, but in the strangest way. I
can access most of the forms, all of the queries and some of the modules.
The corruption happens to random forms and modules, so there is no
pattern there.
Luckily, I keep daily backups, but this isn't a solution - more of a
"fix".
Has anyone had this happen to them? I've searched Google, plus many
other search engines, but I have so far found nothing.
Thanks in advance.
Smitty the crank.
