Award Winning Fax Software since 1999

Using DbSys to repair your database

Although rare, data corruption can occur in databases due to a sudden power outage or other external event that causes an application to be shutdown without the database being properly closed. Depending on the degree of corruption, this condition may prevent Snappy Fax Server or Snappy Fax from properly opening its database on startup.

DbSys is a general database utility that you can use the verify, optimize or repair your database. If the database table is beyond repair then it and the data contained in it will not be recoverable so it is strongly adviseable to regularly backup your database tables, in the event of data corruption. If a table is beyond repair then it should be deleted so that snappy fax or snappy fax server can build a new empty table when it is started.

You should use great care when using DbSys and it is not adviseable to use it for anything other than verify, optimize or repair of data. If you change the database structure, your database may become unuseable with our software. You can, however, view a table's contents without harm. You can download dbsys.zip from our website and extract it to any folder you like, the executable is dbsys.exe.

Download dbsys.zip now

The zip file contains a help file in classic winhelp format.

What you need to know

A database is simply a folder, when you see available databases, don't get confused, they are just folders so to select a database (folder) use the Select button to navigate to the folder where the tables are located. In the fax server software, the default location is c:\faxserver, but you may have selected a different location when you first installed and ran the fax server software. In Snappy Fax, the location is generally c:\documents and settings\YOURUSERNAME\Application data\snappy fax 2000\data, substitute your user name for YOURUSERNAME here.

Tables (data files) within a folder have the following file extensions:

.dat - the main database table
.idx - index file
.blb - blob file that contains image information, you will find .blb files for tables that contain images such as the received fax table.

Now that you know what you are looking for you can run dbsys and use 'Utilities | Repair...' on the menu and then select the database (folder) and the specific table that you want to repair. Dbsys will tell you if the table cannot be repaired, if so then delete the table file, index file and blob file (if any) from the folder so the the fax software can be run, at which time it will create a new database. If you are not sure which table needs to be repaired, simply run repair on all tables in that folder, it will not cause any harm to repair a table that is not corrupt. If dbsys cannot repair the table, there is no other way to recover the data so creating a new table is the only alternative.

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