>Bad 'single event' corruption happens even in the SQL world and, yes, tables can be truncated during a failed write. I wouldn't worry unless it is a recurring event; although someone still has to do due diligence and check the system out before you chalk it up to an anomolous 'bad luck' crash during a file write.
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>Ideally, you find out exactly why a file write failed and caused corruption?. But there is no guarantee that you will find the exact answer (how much time do you have to search? and is the equipment going to be available to you during your search or will they have to keep working on it? etc, etc). It's always going to come down to the vigilence of the client site administrator to reduce the negative affect the great 'mixing bowl' (the specific mix of hardware and applications they have chosen to 'run together') can play on the data. Have they installed some neat new screensaver recently? Or is some piece of hardware going bad? What crashed? Did a workstation die? Was it the server? No machines went down it just stopped working? Details!
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>Perhaps the file size has reached some critical mass for the system in question - buffers are being overloaded and failed. Or maybe it is a hard drive going bad or a network card has intermittent problems. Again, any number of possible explanations - hardware or software based.
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>Anyone charged with administrating a database system has no doubt faced these issues at one point or another. It's a unique problem at that site - perhaps others have seen similar things but there is no single, simple, 'answer' to fix a site with recurring integrity problems that other sites running the same database system simply don't experience. Gotta look at the big picture and imagine all the possibilities - then start testing each and every one. In my book that goes beyond the database developers responsibilities unless you have some sort of contract to do site administration or you can (and do) dictate the specific hardware and software 'mix' your software runs within.
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>Steve

Thanks, Steve. YOur comments are very helpful.

I believe this is the first time any think like this has occured on any app at this large site.

The hardware and network are managed by the IT director. My client went through a big bucks upgrade to the data center last year. Very clean secure room with great UPS backup, Dell servers, RAID disks, etc. One server cpu failed and Dell had a replacement and tech on site within four hours. We didn't lose any data at all.

The IT director told me today that he checked the event log around the time of the file loss and there was nothing at all. No desktop machines failed. Nothing out of the ordinary going on.

I'm going to research a small program glitch that happened a few days before.

Peter