Hey all,

Just had a massive debacle. Was packing a table with about 90,000 records in it when the server freaked out. Got kicked out. Upon looking at the table when I got back in (it was openable, though indexes were gone), the file was corrupted in a way I have _never_ seen before or thought possible. The file actually had data from a _different file_ in it, a file in a completely different part of the file hierarchy (though on the same server share).

I know this sounds impossible, but in looking at the data both in browse view and in a text editor, it is clear there are chunks of data in there from a completely different file.

We have a theory: what crashed our server was likely an open file backup agent which allows backups (Arcserve) to back up open files. Could the agent have been messing with the file at the time of packing (backups were not running) and got the file extent pointers all mixed up or something so the file actually morphed into diferent pieces than its own? This is whacked out, I know, but it is very perplexing.

Another strange thing is this -- The file is 902 bytes wide. In looking at yesterday's backup, we discovered that there were 484 recs added today. When comparing yesterday's file to today's (trashed) file, the trashed file is _exactly_ 902*484 bytes larger. I suppose that could be reporting from somewhere else in the file system other than the actual file, but how can a file that is cleary trashed beyond recognition still report to being the exact size one would expect. This is all just too weird, and it is truly terrible since we are now 484 claims behind and have no hope of pulling the data from this garbaged file.

Has anyone seen _anything_ like this before?

Thanks!

Joe Kaufman
ENCOMPASS Health Mgmt. Systems
jkaufman@encompas.com