Regular users of Microsoft Access are familiar with corruption issues that occasionally create a problem with the MDB files (MDB files store all the crucial Access data). Most try to be prepared with regular backups of all their databases and also by familiarizing themselves with the repair tools that Access provides so that they can quickly carry out an Access recovery in case MDB files do get corrupted. However, even the best laid plans can go wrong ' backups too can get affected in the same way as ordinary MDB files can by malicious attacks, software failures or hardware problems. Further, Access recovery tools prove successful in Access repair only to a certain extent. It therefore makes more sense to take sufficient preventive measures so that you can avoid as much loss of Access data as possible.
Many factors could contribute to the damage to your MDB files. Certain indicators that could suggest something is wrong with your databases is the appearance of #Deleted in certain records, an inability to open an object such as a form in your database or when you are simply unable to open the MDB file in Access. Of course, the Repair and Compact utilities provided by Microsoft Access are useful tools to carry out a quick Access repair when you suspect there is a problem with your MDB files. We will see how these tools can help in recovering and optimizing your MDB files when the corruption levels are still low so that further damage to the files is prevented.
Let us first look at what the Repair utility can do for MDB files. This tool is effective to the extent that it can repair the tables, queries and the indexes in the Access database. However, it does not attempt to fix the damage if any to objects like forms, reports, macros or modules. However, once the database has been repaired, the Repair tool will copy these objects to the new database.
While the Compact utility does not actually carry out any Access repair, it does help in improving the performance of Access by eliminating empty space in an existing Access database. It first creates a new database (created under a new name) and then copies all the objects, from the old database to the new one. If you choose to compact under the same name as the existing database, the Compact tool makes it possible by first exporting all the objects of the database to a temporary database, removing the old database and then renaming the temporary database with the same name as the original database.