Quickest way to get back to a non-corrupt DB, when the DB is already corrupt (i think

[Silentnoise]

I just started playing on Lock Poker. I noticed today that hands were missing from my Lock Poker (merge network) records. The hand HAS been imported, but doesn't show up in reports. (I know because when I do a player search, 410 hands show next to the player name - and only 409 show up in reports, despite clearing filters that aren't there anyway). When re-importing the hands into a new DB, all 410 hands show up. I read that when these hands appear in a new database, and not the old, it usually means your database is corrupted.

I read that reindexing the database could help. I did try this but it appeared to be stuck after about 5 minutes, the OK button was greyed out, and I only had the option to cancel. I didn't try doing it again.

I've had corrupt databases 7 times. I always find it annoying to reimport around 1.6 million hands since it takes so long. Most of these have been in the last year. I heard the restore/backup option is much faster. My questions are:

1) When the database shows signs of being corrupt (hands not showing up in reports that show up in a new database), should I "backup" the database AFTER it has shown signs of being corrupted, and then "restore"? Or is it too late to use the "backup" feature if the database is already corrupted?

2) If its not advisable to use the "backup" feature once the db is corrupted, how do i ensure that when I need to recreate a new database, I have a quick way of doing so? I was thinking something along the lines of, backing up db once a week, restoring that db, and then reimporting the hands that occured after the backup?

3) What can I do about this reindexing problem? Should it just be stuck there after 5 minutes without giving any error message or anything, while the OK button is greyed out? Is that possibly a sign of something more serious?

4) When I exported all hands around 25th December, and re-imported once I reformatted, I noticed I had about 30k import errors. I had lots of datamined hands in my database, is it common for these to be the source of the problem? I hate having hands missing from my database, is there any way of quickly identifying which specific hand histories are causing the import errors...WITHOUT having to import in groups and narrow it down?

5) How do I check a DB for corruptness easily? I was lucky to spot it because I had just signed up to Lock, and was therefore easier to spot.

6) Any chance of a free upgrade considering HM1 seems to hate me and keeps corrupting the DB? PM plz!
Thanks

[Patvs]

1/2 Never backup a database that may already be corrupted. (if you restore it--> you'll restore a corrupted database)
Instead, export the new hands (since the last backup)
Restore the OLD (non-corrupted) backup--> import the new hands.

3 If pgadminIII shows "not responding", just ignore it, the program should unfreeze when the task is finished. Can take hours.
If you eventually get an error, it's a sign of a corrupt database.

4. go to RVG Software/HoldemManager/Importing folder/Logs folder and you can see which hands couldn't be imported and resulted in errors.

5. The 2 most common causes of this problem are: powering off your computer or having your computer lose power while the database is doing something; and an old drive with bad sectors on it.

Basically what happens is a small portion of a file gets slightly corrupt and then when you reboot and windows goes into that checkdsk procedure it finds the bad section and, thinking it is doing a good thing, removes it. Postgres then loads the table and a portion of it is gone so it doesn�t like that and blocks access to the entire table. Normally when this happens it is on a completely useless file that you�ll never even notice is now gone but quite often it will happen to an index in the DB which can easily be rebuilt but in your case it happened to one or more of the tables.

So, to protect against this

1 - Keep your hands histories in case you do need to reimport
2 - Use a power bar and avoid hard shutdowns (when you flick the power switch on the pc)
3 - If your drive is old consider replacing it with a new one. They are cheap and much faster now than even a few years ago.

[Silentnoise]

There are strange things happening again.

Around the 25th December 2011, I needed to reformat my computer. I exported all my hands to txt files, and re-imported once I had reinstalled everything. I still have this RAR file of all my hand history .txt files. I noticed that after importing all my hands, there were approximately 30k import errors. I didn't bother doing anything about it at the time. FWIW, this is the first time I had imported lots of hands and had errors like this.

Yesterday, I noticed signs of my database being corrupted. I exported all hand histories to TXT files once again, created a new database, and started reimporting all hands. I RARd up these hand history files again. So far its completed 1336 out of 1529 files, and there is already 12747 import errors.

Am I right in saying that the hands associated with those 30k import errors the first time round are gone now? And the only way to try reimporting those hands is to go to my RAR backup? I was thinking maybe even import error files are still saved to the new database somehow, but just aren't visible through reports?

What do you think could be the cause of these import errors? I dont really want to keep losing hands every time I export/re-import hands This IS a new database also, as it was the first time. Do you think my database could have been corrupted while doing the first import of all my hand histories?!

Thanks.

[Patvs]

Import error hands aren't saved in the database.
You'll have to reimport them again from the RAR files, or check the RVG Software/HoldemManager/Importing folder/Logs folder.



Cause import errors:
-corrupt database
-something goes wrong when exporting these hands changing the format from the original formatting, for example due to a language setting on your computer, the euro symbol doesn't show correctly in the exported hands
-or there is an issue with the date (also caused by your computer's regional/language/time/date settings. set the date formatting of your computer to M/d/yyyy (and not to European default d/M/yyyy) with regional settings English (United States)

[Silentnoise]

Is there any way I can split up these hand history files into smaller ones? I remember looking at some of the files which didn't import, and some of them were 40mb or so. I want to try making each one 1mb or so. Hopefully this will speed things up. Also, will try changing the date to mm/dd/yy format.

thanks

[netsrak]

There are windows filehandling tools around which can do this but the problem is that it splits the files in the middle of a hand.
I think the only way to split the files is opening them in a texteditor like notepad++ and saving parts of the file.

Are you using auto-import or import file/folder. The auto-import has problems with large files.

[Silentnoise]

is it possible to import all hands on another computer, and then transfer the database over to this computer? using the .backup file?

would pt3's file splitter work with the huge HM1 HH files?

[Patvs]

Yes you can import all the hands.
Backup the database: http://faq.holdemmanager.com/questio...estoreDatabase
Then restore the .backup on another computer (saving you the time, of having to reimport the hands on the other PC).
Restoring a backup will be much faster.


What's the size of the largest HH file? If you export hands from HM1, if should already split up the files.