What if my CRM database gets corrupted?
Contact by Zaweba opens a repair window if its database is damaged, so you can restore the latest good backup or rebuild from the saved emails.
With Contact by Zaweba, a corrupted database is a nuisance rather than a disaster. If the database is damaged or missing, Contact opens a repair window instead of crashing, and offers to restore the latest good backup or rebuild from the saved original emails. The damaged file is moved aside, never deleted, and mail that arrived since the backup comes back at the next check because it is still on the server.
How databases get damaged
A database can be damaged by a power cut or crash at the wrong moment, a failing disk, or a copy made while the program was writing to it. Most of the time nothing goes wrong for years. Contact is built on the assumption that, one day, something might.
A quick database check runs at each start, and a full one runs weekly. Those checks are how Contact notices a problem and opens the repair window rather than starting normally and failing later.
Choosing between restore and rebuild
Restoring the latest good backup is usually the first choice. Contact makes an automatic backup once a day, keeping seven daily and four weekly copies by default, plus a copy before every upgrade. A restore brings back your records, tags, stars, notes, customer folders and settings as they were when the backup was made.
Rebuilding from the saved original emails is the other route. Contact keeps the emails it collects, and the rebuild recreates the database from them. It suits the case where no good backup is available.
What you might need to redo
After a restore, Contact fetches again any mail that arrived since the backup, because Contact reads your mailbox without deleting or moving mail (filing spam aside). So emails are not lost.
What may need redoing is work you did inside Contact since the backup: a tag added, a note written, a record converted to a customer. With daily backups that is rarely more than a day's worth, and often much less.
Making recovery easy before you need it
Leave the automatic backups on. They are what make a restore quick.
Make a full backup now and then and keep it away from the PC. File > Back up everything writes one zip of database, attachments, original emails and settings. A copy on another drive protects you against a failed disk, which the copies on the same disk cannot.
Restore from backup on the File menu does the same job by hand. It checks the backup first and keeps today's data aside, so it is safe to use when moving to a new PC as well as after trouble.
Avoid copying the database file while Contact is running. That is one of the easier ways to end up with a damaged copy.
Undo for smaller mistakes
Not every problem is a damaged file. More often it is a wrong click: a record merged with the wrong one, a sender filed as Spam by mistake. For those, Recent actions lists every change in plain words with its own Undo, kept for 30 days. Undo first checks that everything the action changed is still as it left it, so undoing doesn't trample later work.
Why it is designed this way
Contact keeps everything on your own PC, with no Zaweba server holding a copy. That keeps your customer data private, and it means the app has to look after that data itself. Daily backups, start-up checks, a repair window that keeps the damaged file, and mail that can always be fetched again from your server together make a corrupted database something you can recover from in a few minutes.
