This is the first time I encountered serious database issues after years of use, I didn’t found other cases like this so here I am.
Here are what happened:
The Mac complains “The application X is not open anymore” whenever I open any application
I found that the file descriptors seem to be exhausted due to the existing of a large number of cron processes(this occurred on another Catalina device of mine too)
I closed some applications(to save some fds) then opened the terminal and disabled all my cron jobs
I rebooted the Mac through the top-left Apple icon(however I guess there are applications quitted forcibly due to not responding)
After reboot, I opened DT3 and it suggests me to do a Verify & Repair
I kept the V&R running for a night(it didn’t finish nor respond after an hour), in the morning the result is a fail, there are thousands of missing files, 0 orphans as I recall
I tried V&R again, it finished quickly with the same result
I closed all databases then relaunched DT3
V&R again, and it turned out success(the result is the same after I repeat step 8 to 9)
I was expecting a failure on step 9, so I could try to do a restore from a backup as the manual suggested.
My questions are:
Do I have to be worried about anything, is the database really repaired?
The missing files in the log are cleared so I can’t manually verify if the missing files are there.
Since the index and the actual data files are stored separately, if the V&R success there should be no problem, but how does the index files got repaired all by itself?
Sounds like an issue of Catalina and/or the cron jobs. What kind of jobs do you use and how many?
If should be fine if no more errors are reported. You could also rebuild the database, just to ensure that there’s definitely nothing wrong anymore. And of course a good backup strategy is also highly recommended, especially but not only on Catalina.
Actually the index doesn’t repair itself. Are the indexed files located on an external or network volume? Was is mounted and responsive? Or maybe it was just another of the way too many Catalina issues.
There’s an alert that the database is already opened by another instance of DT3 while the rebuilding process is going on and I clicked cancel, then my database becomes empty, after a round of V&R, all my files are now in a single directory named “Orphaned Files”, all the directory structures are gone.
I tried to restore from the latest backup, but “switching to backup of database failed”.
It’s probably the iCloud sync location, the sync store might be damaged due to the original issues too. I would suggest to clean this sync store (see contextual menu in Preferences > Sync).
Impossible to tell after all these attempts, I would suggest to have a closer look at the database and whether everything’s still there. And a screenshot of the icon issue would be useful.
It was probably lost during the recovery. I’m not even sure whether the Catalina installation is still fine or whether a complete reinstallation would be better. But first I would highly recommend a good backup strategy of all your data (not only databases).
Wow, I recovered the database in the TimeMachine and opened it, guess what? The icons are back on both databases! Can I merge these two databases so I can get a union of the two?