Error opening database - freaking out!

[schreinereiner]

Ok, I'm trying to stay calm, but am getting closer to really freaking out by the minute.

Every time I try to open my urd i get the message "Error opening database "location": Invalid database file was specified".

I rebooted my computer, I reinstalled Ultra recall and I tried a backup, all with the same result. Funny enough, yesterday it still worked. I have no clue as to what I am supposed to do now. There are close to three years of data in that database and I can't afford to loose it. The urd is about 136 MB in size.

Any suggestions? Help of any kind is appreciated

Sebastian

[quant]

aaaargh, do you make version backups? I can't help in this case, but maybe it's a good advice for the future: http://www.versionbackup.sb-aw.com/
set it to make a version backup every day, ... say storing last 20 days.

Do you not have any recent version of that file on another media? What would you do if your HDD crashed?

[schreinereiner]

Originally posted by quant
aaaargh, do you make version backups? I can't help in this case, but maybe it's a good advice for the future: http://www.versionbackup.sb-aw.com/
set it to make a version backup every day, ... say storing last 20 days.

Do you not have any recent version of that file on another media? What would you do if your HDD crashed?

Well I did have a backup on a separate drive. It was copied of the functioning version. I was, however, not doing version copies. I just have no idea what happened here. Hopefully someone from the Kinook team can help. Please?

[kinook]

The error message indicates that the database engine (SQLite) can't open it. It sounds like something corrupted your .urd file. Try recovering from a backup from yesterday or earlier. You can ZIP and send the .urd file to support@kinook.com using something like http://www.mailbigfile.com/ for us to analyze, but if it's corrupted it may not be recoverable.

[schreinereiner]

Originally posted by kinook
The error message indicates that the database engine (SQLite) can't open it. It sounds like something corrupted your .urd file. Try recovering from a backup from yesterday or earlier. You can ZIP and send the .urd file to support@kinook.com using something like http://www.mailbigfile.com/ for us to analyze, but if it's corrupted it may not be recoverable.

I'm uploading my zipped urd to my filespace and will send you a link and password. If recovery doesn't work I can only hope that I have a renegade older version flying around at home. I had just run a backup after working with the urd so my backup I have at hand here is also not accessible.

Thanks for the help!

[schreinereiner]

Ok, this ends up being only a small catastrophe. I found a backup at home that is working and about three weeks old.

Luckily enough I only used the program relatively little in that time period so I really only lost a couple hours of work I believe. Most of that was research of last week, which is still pretty fresh in my mind. I guess I know what I will be recovering tonight...

First of all however I'm setting up automatic daily incremental updates through Trueimage!

Thanks for the support!

[quant]

Originally posted by schreinereiner
First of all however I'm setting up automatic daily incremental updates through Trueimage!

First of all, this will give you only ONE backed up version. I don't want to be paranoid, but you never know ...
Second, seems too late, but you could give a try to free version of SyncBack SE, it's excellent, it does probably all that you need and much more
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

[schreinereiner]

Originally posted by quant
First of all, this will give you only ONE backed up version. I don't want to be paranoid, but you never know ...
Second, seems too late, but you could give a try to free version of SyncBack SE, it's excellent, it does probably all that you need and much more
http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html

Interesting that you're mentioning SyncBack. It's exactly what I've been using so far. However I only did a regular one-way backup with no versioning whatsoever. Obviously not the smartest choice...
How are you using it? I'm always willing to learn!

As to only having one backed up version:
The incremental backup in trueimage actually saves all the different versions since the last full backup. So if I make a full backup on Monday and six incremental backups during the week (assuming I change data in the Ultra Recall database daily) by Sunday I will end up with seven different versions of the database to restore. See http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/ateQuestionNResponse/0,289625,sid5_cid419862_tax286189,00.html

Running full backups every day just seems a little overkill to me.

[quant]

Originally posted by schreinereiner
Interesting that you're mentioning SyncBack. It's exactly what I've been using so far. However I only did a regular one-way backup with no versioning whatsoever. Obviously not the smartest choice...
How are you using it? I'm always willing to learn!

As to only having one backed up version:
The incremental backup in trueimage actually saves all the different versions since the last full backup. So if I make a full backup on Monday and six incremental backups during the week (assuming I change data in the Ultra Recall database daily) by Sunday I will end up with seven different versions of the database to restore. See http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/ateQuestionNResponse/0,289625,sid5_cid419862_tax286189,00.html

Running full backups every day just seems a little overkill to me.

you are right about differential/incremental backup. The free version of SyncBack only does simple back-up. That's why I mentioned another free soft at the beginning, VersionBackup, which is good for having several versions of the same file (this does the incremental versioning). All that follows you can probably do in one commercial software. But I dont have money to waste on programs where there is a freeware that does the same. UR is one of very few programs that I pay for, as there is no comparable freeware :)
My strategy is this:
I set up the VersionBackup for incremental backup of the files that I want to have several versions of (on the same HDD). With SyncBack, I basically copy my whole drive to another drive, ie. updating the files that has changed and deleting those that were removed. So I always have the backup image of my main HDD (this saved me few months ago, when my laptop HDD died).
Both programs can be scheduled, but I'm little paranoid, so I run it myself manually. There is an option "programs to run before ...", so I set in SyncBack profile to run VersionBackup. So every day, once click of a button, the new versions of files that changed (those that I want to have several versions of) are created, and right after that, it updates the backup of my whole HDD to another drive.