> So I've never personally seen the "file is damaged" any time
> except immediately upon opening a file. Perhaps there's a
> problem in some part of the file that's not being caught by the
> checksum (why, I don't know) and only triggers the error when
> that part is put into use.
I have, just a couple of days ago. I opened the file with no problem. A bit
later after not having made any changes, I did a find for duplicates (with
!) and it said that the file was damaged. Two of us had each taken home a
copy of the running system and were independently working on finding ways to
remove some persistent duplicates. My copy had the problem, his did not and
the original did not. Very curious. It is a large payments file (150+ meg).
The only thing significantly different that I can guess is my machine has
more memory and is faster than the other two. A few days later I brought
home a version that was only slightly different and it has no problems. I
don't even want to think about how to chase this bug.
The largeness of the file brings up an iteresting issue. The payments file
for everyone is going to grow every year and will eventually get to be a
problem. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about strategies for pruning
it occasionally while retaining some ability to query past history. The kind
of thing I am thinking about is retaining a total by year for each member
but deleting all the individual transactions that were made that year.
Perhaps such historical information should be in a separate file and perhaps
not even open unless you want to do historical queries or do the pruning
step. I have less need for a similar historical file for names but some
might. I wouldn't mind deleting non-active people from names, but still be
able to go back to them every few years and try to convince them to become
active again and if they do, reinstate their past history.
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