Though most Access users take the required precautions to prevent corruption, at times heavy usage of the MDB databases does cause problems to arise and indexes to get damaged. In such cases, use the know-how mentioned din our article below to understand how to recover from Access corruption.
The most important thing that Access users should invest their time and resources in is in employing methods that will prevent corruption in the MDB databases as well as prevent any damage to the files. However, despite the best efforts and even for experts or long-time users, it is not possible to prevent corruption at all times in the Access databases. The only option left then is to carry out an Access repair so that all the crucial data can be recovered from the MDB databases.
It is always a good ideal to make a backup copy of the Access database that you are trying to repair. This way you have the latest copy of the unaffected data as also all the recent changes that would have been made in the MDB files. Take a backup copy of the MDB file that you believe is corrupted when Access is not running. Also ensure that any earlier backups are not overwritten. There are times when during recovery, the database becomes more damaged than before and a large portion of the data is lost. In case an Access repair does not work out, you can try different approaches and combinations to restore as much of data as possible from the various backups.
The next step is to simply try the built-in repair tool – Compact and Repair Tool provided by Microsoft Access. This is a very simple solution that works very effectively for most of the time, helping you get rid of corrupted objects, and works well with corrupted indexes.
The question now is how to deal with specific problems that may not have been fixed by the Compact and Repair tool such as corruption in forms and reports or variation in the number of records.
When you are developing reports, forms and other front-end objects and trying to generate the code in their modules, they are likely to get corrupted from time to time. When you suspect that the forms or reports are corrupted, you can start off by importing all other objects into a new database. You can also try setting minimal references under Tools | References and then compiling. However, if there is corruption in the forms and reports, it is unlikely that you will be able to set the references. Skip the objects that you are not able to import and see if you can carry out an Access repair from the previous backups. It should be easy to import these forms and reports from previous backups.
There are many other such corruption problems that plague Access databases from time and time. Though the Compact and Repair tool is very effective in dealing with most of them, there may be times when it is unable to fix a corrupt MDB file. The best option then might be to go for a third-party tool such as DataNumen Access Repair from DataNumen. Built specifically for fixing corruption issues in Access databases, DataNumen Access Repair can deep scan corrupt files and restore maximum data from them.