User Support Forum

We have been using Power Church 8 for several years, and have a DB with several hundred members. Yesterday a computer user who helps with data entry and running labels for mailings reported she could not access the data base, and had no Internet access or Email access. Then the main user reported that when they open Power Church the database only has one member. I am a computer technician trying to help resolve this problem. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Bob Reimer

Bob Reimer wrote:We have been using Power Church 8 for several years, and have a DB with several hundred members. Yesterday a computer user who helps with data entry and running labels for mailings reported she could not access the data base, and had no Internet access or Email access. Then the main user reported that when they open Power Church the database only has one member. I am a computer technician trying to help resolve this problem. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Bob Reimer

You didnt' say if this is occurring on one machine, or many machines, so some questions:

1. Is this a stand-alone or networked computer?
2. Is this the 'server' computer, that is where the PC+ database resides, or a 'client'.?
3. Are all the machines having problems with Internet access and database access?
4. What version of Windows, as well as how much RAM is available ?
5. When was the last reindex of the database performed?
6. Do you have a backup made recently ?? (Just in case)

FWIW ... losing internet access on one machine could, as you know, just mean that that machine is having network problems, which would also cause an issue if the machine is a Powerchuch client machine.

As far as losing the database, its very rare outside of having a corrupt file. If you can verify that the DATA directory is still available under the Powerchurch directory, look at the sizes of the files. As you have many members, the MA file should be much larger than just, say 100 kb.

1. One of the user machines hosts the DB for the others on the network.
2. The client machine was originally not able to access the DB, Email, or internet.
3. The users machine that hosts the DB has access to the internet, and emial, but when they open the DB it now only shows one member.
4. All machines are running Windows XP, I recently upgraded the client machine to 640MB of memory, they were at 128mb
5. I do not know how often they run the index. I will be going to the Church this morning to work on these problems, and will ask.
6. When we had the machine in the shop two weeks ago we created an image of both hard drives. They have not been doing normal backups becasue a volunteer user deleted some members instead of inactivting them, and they were hoping to recover the members from an old backup, and then merge them with the current DB.

Bob Reimer wrote:They have not been doing normal backups becasue a volunteer user deleted some members instead of inactivting them, and they were hoping to recover the members from an old backup, and then merge them with the current DB.

There is actually NO WAY to merge this data. I suspect that the problem may be that the system needs a reindex.

As far as the data that was deleted, once they get the database straightened out, they need to:

1. Make a CURRENT backup using the Powerchurch Backup Utility.
2. Restore the old backup.
3. Find the members for whom data has been deleted, and TAG those records under the Family Mailing LIst
4. Run the Membership Master Report from the Family Mailing list reports, use the TAGGED selection criteria. This will print out all the data that the system has on them (excepting attendence).
5. Restore the CURRENT database, then enter this data manually.

FWIW ... the only people who had DELETE permissions at my old church were myself as the System Admin, and the Clerk of Session who maintained the membership rolls. This eliminated any issues with users accidentally deleting data.