Last night I spent several hours examining each of the other 30+ tables in the VFP application. A few small ones, lookup tables mostly, are undamaged. None of the transaction tables have any significant amount of salvageable data in them. For most tables, the most recent valid entry was created in 2004 or 2005. Because of that, I have declared that set of data to be unsalvageable. We were able to restore to a backup created January 15, 2007. The client will re-enter transactions from that point forward. Fortunately, they do keep paper copies.

Obviously, there is a lesson here about the type, quality and integrity of backups for an enterprise. Having survived a server crash myself about 6 weeks ago, I am thankful to have had current image backups from which to restore. In my client's case, many of the recent backups had failed or had been stored on the disks that failed. One thing that was entirely lost was the Active Directory structure and the user's profiles and permissions. Either it wasn't backed up or was improperly restored. Also lost were license keys for some of the software. The products were purchased online and the only record of the key was in email. There probably is a lesson here for many companies. Perhaps some can learn it in a little less traumatic way. Disaster recovery isn't just about terrorism.