Using Compact And Repair Utility To Perform Access File Recovery

A lot of things can take place in your Access database that might make the database inaccessible, damaged or corrupt. As a result of corruption, the corrupt database might seem to be disappearing or might delete certain records, make your records become inaccessible etc. Microsoft offers a free utility to ensure you lose your Access data. The utility is Compact and Repair Utility for MS Access. Compact and Repair Utility is a useful executable used to repair MS Access database files. Before we get into the working of the software, let's look at some of the reasons that result to MDB corruption:


Interrupted (broken) write operation


Faulty hardware components


Accessing or saving MDB file in another program


Points to ponder before you use Compact and Repair utility
Here are some things that you must keep in mind before you use Compact and Repair utility for your corrupt or inaccessible MDB database:


Ensure of enough free memory in your hard disk for storing the original and the compacted versions of the Access Database. Hence, you must have at least 2 times the size of your Access database on your hard disk.


Ensure that you have Open/Run and Open Exclusive permissions for the Access Database. If you are the author of the database, make sure that you have set the permissions.


Make sure no other user can open your Access database


Ensure that your Access database is not located on Network Share (read-only) or is set to have its attribute set to Read-only


Using Compact and Repair utility
While you use the Compact and Repair utility, the utility will compact the unused space in the database that was created by deletions of object and record. The utility creates a new database at the different location and copies all objects from the old database to the new database.

As far as repairing the database is concerned, Compact and Repair utility repairs only the tables, queries and the indexes in the database. It will not try to repair damaged forms, reports, macros or modules.

Although, Microsoft offers a free utility to repair the corrupt MDB database, but just like it’s any other repair utility, this one (Compact and Repair utility) doesn’t works up to the mark. As a result of this, you need to rely on some third party Access file recovery software that can help you recover your data from your corrupt MDB database file.

Use Access recovery software that is devised specially to repair and recover data from MDB database files. mdb recovery software is able to recover data from password protected MDB files. In addition to this Access file recovery tool can recover table structure, data, memo data, OLE data, and original date format and table relationships. It can efficiently restore key data structures like autonumber, primary key, field size etc. The tool is available as free evaluation version too, so you can check the working and features of this Access file recovery tool and ensure accurate results for the same.

By: Atwoodpowell

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The author of this article is an IT expert who comes across data corruption and inaccessibility issues at a regular basis. Having the in-depth knowledge of Do’s and Don’ts of data recovery, access recovery, mdb recovery and he informs others about the same.