Spike writes: > I have experienced a great loss due to an island-wide power failure > that lasted for just over 5 hours yesterday. I had the complete TBOT > and TBUDL lists going back about 4 years. The power failure lasted > longer than my UPS's and I LOST the entire mail folders for these > lists.
I've had TB crash on occasion and I've brutally aborted it on occasion as well, but I've never experienced corruption of any of the mail folders. I suppose it might be possible if TB stopped or crashed at some crucial instant while it was updating the folders, but fortunately that doesn't seem to happen very often. > TB! told me the message bases were corrupted. The folder item > 'maintenance' was greyed out, and TB! said to run chkdsk. Just from a power failure? > I ran SCANDISK and it ZEROED OUT the message bases for these two > lists, plus about 5 others! The implication is that some of the files used by TB were seriously corrupted. Do you run FAT or NTFS? FAT is very, very bad; you should always run NTFS under XP. > I have a backup done about a week ago, but I have lost all the traffic > since that date. I guess my question is - "Is there any other better > procedure I SHOULD have followed in this case?" More frequent backups, and if you are running a FAT file system, you should move to NTFS instead, which is _far_ more resistant to file-system corruption. It's easy to hash a FAT partition so badly that you lose practically everything, but NTFS is very difficult to corrupt. > In this case, the laptop USB port does not provide sufficient > current to run the external drive. I run the laptop AND the external > drive with associated power brick on a 550VA UPS, which lasts about > 4 hours (worst case). The power failure lasted just over 5 hours > (THREE lightning strikes in the main generator house within 30 > seconds!). The laptop continued to run for the duration (on internal > battery) but the external drive did NOT. Mail runs continued to try > to run during the time of the outage of the external drive, > corrupting the message bases. Unfortunately I was not at home until > AFTER the 4 hours life of the UPS battery, so I could do nothing > about the issue after the fact. The UPS must have cut power at exactly the wrong instant if TB managed to corrupt the databases. I suppose you might have write-into cache enabled somewhere but I'm not sure how or if XP implements this. -- Anthony __________________________________________________ Using The Bat! v3.5.25 on Windows XP 5.1 Build 2600 Service Pack 2 ________________________________________________ Current version is 3.51.10 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
