James from New Millenium (makers of MetaData Magic) contacted me
offering to help troubleshoot problems that MDM may have caused in
the file I mentioned. (How's that for responsive?)
I want to clarify that I don't think that MDM caused any damage to
our file, rather it may have exposed corruption that was already
there, or it may be a complete coincidence. Judging their product on
a file that has been recovered several times in the last 10 years and
is certain to have structure corruption is hardly fair.
geoff
On Jul 19, 2007, at 7:28 AM, Geoff Graham wrote:
I can corroborate this a bit. After cleaning an FM6 file with MDM,
it no longer recovers cleanly, restoring many long-ago deleted
fields. I can't say for sure that MDM did it but I've been doing
this for 10 years and haven't seen it before. Circumstances have
postponed conversion to FM7 format, so for now we have to live with
it.
I wrote an applescript to automate the cleaning of these references
in the FM7 define file references dialog; setting them all to
simple relative paths. Much less tedious that way.
geoff
On Jul 19, 2007, at 6:12 AM, Winfried Huslik wrote:
Peter,
Unfortunately I couldn't read the original question since I've
just subscribed, but what you see is typical for a file converted
form FM6 (and earlier). Back then you were unable to modify or
delete a file reference. Once it was defined it lived in the file
forever.
The MetaDataMagic File Reference Fixer claims to easily remove
unwanted file references in .fp5 files. Nevertheless I suggest NOT
TO USE it. For a rationale please read <http://www.fmchecker.com/
filereferencefix.html>.
The clean but tedious method is to go through all your converted
files and set the file references manually (to a relative path
(where appropriate)).
This is a daring statement from FMI:
"Furthermore, the conversion process does not propagate
corruption that may have existed in a prior version."
which only can mean that the structure of the converted file is
OK. It can by no means guarantee that the content (which are
definitions as well as the data) is complete.
Winfried
www.fmdiff.com/fm/filecorruption.html
On 19.07.2007, at 05:07, Peter Payne wrote:
Hi, thanks for the reply.
But first, I wanted to quote some good news for you, from
FileMaker's "techbrief_fm7_migration.pdf" document, page 8:
"Furthermore, the conversion process does not propagate
corruption that may have existed in a prior version."
Now, I don't know if you can trust that 100%, but it should give
you a better start (unless the conversion fails, and then you'll
know the worst).
Roger. I wish there were a known reason why this happened in the
first place. I'm not the first Filemaker guy to think that,
methinks.
I've done a conversion, and I ended up with some weird stuff,
like, I have only one invoices database, but it's reporting links
to invoices8.fp7, invoices7.fp7, invoices6.fp6, which don't/
shouldn't exist. Can I ask what MetaDataMagic does? Are there
any, er, consultants out there who are proficient in its use in
converting files?
