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Chris S

Database corruption in Sage Timeslips 2013

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Hi. I'm an IT consultant working for a small CPA firm with 4 employees, who use Sage Timeslips for very basic time tracking and billing. They never upgraded beyond 2013 because it 'did what they needed'. I've installed Timeslips on a few new workstations over the years, but that's been the extent of my exposure until now.  They have a file sever running windows server 2012, where the 'timeslips' shared folder resides, and windows 10 pro workstations joined to the domain.  I do multiple backups of their file server every day, and keep backups going back weeks and months, but I found out they never bothered creating a 'Timeslips' specific backup on exit of the program (the backup that produces the .bku file stored locally on the workstation). 

Yesterday they told me they've been encountering errors when running Timeslips 'for a few weeks'.  The errors seem to be sporadic, and if they exit, wait, and try again, seems like they have been able to continue. But now things seem to have gotten worse. They have been so busy trying to deal with the July 15 deadline and all the extra work created by 'PPP' issues, that they have not even had time to engage me until now. 

I have restored three copies of their networked 'timeslips' folder from 6/11, 6/21, and 6/30, hoping to find a 'good' set of files that pre-date whatever 'corruption' may have occurred. 

I have restored the oldest backup set to a new folder - eg, '\timeslips-2', and used station administrator to point the desktop environment to this new folder, and also to point the 'install folder' to this same location. I have been able to launch timeslips on the workstation, and do some rudimentary data review and pull a basic report, then cleanly exit, and do a timeslips-specific backup on exit that completes without error (so I get the '.bku' file in the local directory).

But invariably, if I re-launch a few times, or, if I try to configure a second workstation to connect to the same new database, I start to get errors - 'a data file appears to be damaged. Please close and then restart ... One sample error is: 

Area: Table.

Error Code: 128.

Class: tBDETableExceptionC

Table: Slip (60)

...

Exception tBDETableExceptionC in module Timeslip.exe at 00A9B44F.

Table: Slip

Record: 0

BDE Code: 11108

I also get similar errors for Table: General Setting; Record: 0; BDE Code: 11108, and I think a whole lot of other tables. 

I've tried running data validation (read-only, not actually fixing anything) on the database; I get a horrendous amount of errors - 84? and it 'strongly urges' me to restore from a backup. 

And once I get these errors, the program seems to become unusable - errors out of every action. 

I've done a clean install of the software on a workstation, and a clean restore of the 6/11 timeslips folder. I immediately did a 'data validation' action on the database and got a smaller number of errors, but it still warned me to restore from backup. Then a second run of the validation brought me back to the huge number of errors. I've also tried to do an export, but that fails. 

The company are willing to upgrade to the latest version but while that would put them on a supported release, figuring out the current data corruption would not be supported so I think I need to figure out what's up with the current database.   What's odd to me is, I can sometimes complete a few 'typical' actions in the program, but later those same actions encounter the errors.  There's plenty of space on the file server. No other programs are experiencing issues (they primarily run LaCerte on the network). They have a very, very basic setup. 

So I'm really looking for advice on a way forward that will at least rescue their data.  They are willing to work, at least temporarily, in a 'single workstation' / 'single user' mode - just have one person do all the data entry and report generation. This would allow me to do a 'single workstation' install perhaps?  Restore the former network 'timeslips' folder to a local folder on the C: drive, and use station administrator to point to it, taking the network out of the equation. Is that a path worth pursuing? Any other suggestions? 

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    Timeslips 2013 is not supported on windows 10 so that could be a source of the issues. Sounds like you have lock files That are getting stuck. There are some things that can be done to resolve errors you are describing but I would suggest working with a consultant like myself. Since they are willing to upgrade I would try upgrading the database and seeing if it can be done and what errors occur. Once we know if we can upgrade without fixing or if we have to fix first we can make a better plan. You can reach out to me at 203-254-7736 to discuss options if you want. 
    Note that if they upgrade through a consultant by September they can get 2020 which is a perpetual license version. After that only option will be subscription which must be renewed annually. The subscription includes Support and Upgrades as they are released. 

  • 0 in reply to Caren2

    Update.  I found that by restoring the '\timeslips\' directory from my file-system backup to the C: drive of one of the workstations resulted in totally error-free behavior.  I was able to do a 'database Verify' and get zero errors, and test out various functions. So this suggests the problem was related to running on the network.  Sage Timeslips 2013 has been running in this configuration since 2014. The File server has remained untouched for years, and is a windows server 2012 R2 machine presenting NTFS 'shares' to the workstations, which 'see' the shares using 'mapped network drives'. This server has not been patched in a long while - so no recent changes there.  The workstations all started out as Windows 7 Pro boxes in 2014, but I upgraded them to windows 10 a year or more ago. I just looked at the workstation I'm testing with using 'winver' and it's still at 1903 - (March 2019). So no obvious changes there.  They only use Windows Defender for Anti-Virus; this does smell of an Anti-Virus type issue - network traffic being interfered with in some way. They also employ a Sophos firewall, but I think that is entirely focused on network traffic passing in or out of the network to the public internet, not local traffic. 

    This problem began about 2 weeks ago. If it's a problem with Windows Defender and NTFS network shares, I would expect multiple people to be affected, and/or multiple applications. Their LaCerte setup seems totally unaffected. 

    Caren2 - I will call you tomorrow about the upgrade/etc. Thanks! 

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