A rather strange thing happened at my company today. Bear with me, because this takes a bit of setup information. Our main data server locked up. This server houses our FoxPro (6.0) database and application. Well, after the server was rebooted, I found some strange corruption in one of the tables that I hope someone can explain to me. We ended up restoring the data from tape after I tried a few shots in the dark at repairing it. The corruption I found was that our "Policy" table had mostly good data, but had several records at the "bottom" (ie. without an "ORDER" set) that were messed up. All numeric and date fields were empty and all character fields were filled with some strange character (it just shows as these little "boxes" if I output the field using ?). The character is replicated to the full field width (ie. the "PermitNo" field is 20 chars wide so it has 20 "boxes"). I quickly realized these weren't new records, but rather were overwritten records.

Okay, so we decide to restore the data from tape from last night. That's always fun. Afterwards, I'm contrasting the backup copy that I made of the corrupt data against the restored data, and here's the strange part: the last good record in the corrupt table corresponded to the last record after the restore (ie. all the corrupt records in the "Policy" table were the records that were added today!). I don't understand how only today's data could be affected by whatever happened.

Now, a little more background: there were probably anywhere from 5-8 people hitting the database when the server locked up. I was actually appending records to the "Policy" table from a temporary table, and I suspect this was part of the problem. We don't know whether the application screwed up and cause the server to lock up, or if it's the other way around and the server locked up for some reason (we had no log or event in the Event Viewer) and this caused the data to get messed up. But, I'm mainly just confused how only today's data would be affected.

Can someone enlighten me? Or at least make an attempt? Thanks.