Regrettably I have not kept external copies of my backups in DT Pro and now I am in a pickle. Upon opening the app this morning I was informed that the datafile had an error and I should verify it; that yielded a report that there were thousands of errors, and the database essentially vanished. I read the help and tried to restore from the most recent of the 3 backups I keep. It had the same problem and went from 455 MB to 0. I tried the next most recent back up. Same result. I now (slow learner) have made a copy of the one remaining backup and searched this forum for advice. I found one from Christian Grunenberg (2007) which said
"Please select the database package in the Finder, choose “Show Package Contents” in the contextual menu and copy (!) one of the Backup folders to the desktop. Copy (!) the Files folder into the copied (!) Backup folder and finally append the extension “.dtBase” to the copied folder’s name.
You should be able to open this backup now by double clicking on it - does this procedure work for any of the Backup folders?"
When I look at the Package contents, however, the contents of the “Files” folder are far smaller than the size of my backup and are not up to date; the folder says it was last updated in February of this year and the files themselves show dates of 2006 and 2007. My Prefs were set to backup once every day and keep 3 backups (obviously in light of current experience I would make some changes!).
So putting the contents of the “files” folder into a copied “backup” folder and changing the file extension, as advised in C Grunenberg’s post, is not going to restore my database. I have already lost some data, everything from the last two days of active use (there were some days in the past week where I did not alter DTP’s database) but surely there is a way to get this one remaining backup to work? After making 2 copies I tried opening one of the backup copies by double-clicking on it; this time when it told me it had a major file error, instead of asking it to rebuild it I chose “Ignore” and the result was that while DTPro opened a database that was empty, after I quit I found that the database copy was still at 455 MB.
Another question: I thought I had DTP set to check for updates and let me know but I see that I am running 1.3 and the latest is 1.5.1. Is there any chance that upgrading might fix my problem?
Thanks to all who have read this far and I look forward to your analysis and suggestions.
[As for cause, all I can think of is that someone else used my computer yesterday while we were trying to figure out a problem with our Airport Extreme Base Station and possibly did an improper shutdown.]
Cynthia