I have only seen Access file corruption maybe two or three times in all the 20+ years I have been developing and deploying Access applications. All my apps include a front end application & back end data file. About a month ago, one of my clients
had a backend DB go corrupt. I repaired it, and they were off and running.
But then about three days ago, they started having it happen multiple times per day. I repaired successfully each time and began investigating (something that is almost impossible with Access corruption). Oddly enough, the users that are already in there,
even after getting the "unrecognized format" message, will be able to continue working (although I am not certain whether they can do any updates or not). When they close out and try to reconnect, they get the same message. When I open the back end
directly, I get the same message but can simply run a repair.
And then it happened to a different back-end file on the same server, but this back-end has a different front-end application. I think that eliminates the particular front or back end application as a suspect. (Caveat: I wrote both of them, so it is
always possible that there is some design deficiency in both, but why would it pop up in both 11 MB & 52 MB back-end files on the same day).
To eliminate data connection/flow problems as suspects, I went into the office on the weekend, shut down the entire network, unplugged most of the network cables, shut down all the computers, ran Windows updates on all workstations, and brought everything
back up again.
And today, the first day for them after I did that, it is back to becoming corrupt, now every few minutes and even with just two users connected. I had the users, one at a time, switch to running the front-end application within an RD session on a different
computer that was not running the app when it went corrupt. That made no difference, which eliminates either of those two computers--the only two connected the last time the file went corrupt. It went corrupt even when on Windows 10 with Office 2013 runtime.
(I may be able to test upgrading Access runtime to 2016, assuming that none of the computers are Click-To-Run versions of Office). All computers run the front-end applications as .accdr (runtime) files.
But besides perhaps tinkering with the Access runtime versions, it seems that leaves network equipment and a Windows 2012 R2 host server storing the back ends but that is showing no other signs of any problems with any other files.
Am I missing something here, or do I just have to start replacing network equipment to see if that fixes it? Oh, how I wish I had written the whole thing using a SQL back end 15 year ago. Easy to say now. But that is not so simple to do now.
