Help!

We have a simple Daylite system with a shared database running on a server.

The Problem
Sometime in the past couple of weeks some glitch has trashed a whole host of our contacts. We suspect it is Sync related. Great we thought - we've got a backup... but we've had some problems.

1) For unrelated reasons (migration to new server hardware) we don't have a Daylite generated server backup for a date prior to the glitch occurring.

2) We have a backup of an offline version of the database created by one of our users far enough back to have the missing records in it.

We have tried various approaches to 'restoring' this offline copy back to the server - but whatever we try seems unable to reset the data on the server copy of the database.

We tried copying the offline copy to the server and 'restoring' it over an offline copy created on the server. But Daylite then refuses to run the resulting database (though curiously is quite happy to restore the database in the first place).

The Plea for Help
What can we do to restore our data?

• Is there a way to restore our database starting with the data in the offline database?
  
• Is there a way to do a 'diff' between our messed up database and the one with the whole data set - so we can extract the 'changes' made after the corruption took place?

I'm really deeply unhappy about this problem occurring. We used to use, and then abandoned a system called ACT! some years ago. ACT! was clunky to use, slow, and far to complicated for its own good. And it was dangerously flaky when it came to running multiple users accessing a shared database.

Getting our users to consider Daylite was tough - the ACT! experience was pretty poor. When this latest sync related disaster came along, the first thing that was said was "right we're going back to spreadsheets - we can't afford another ACT! event". Daylite is clunky to use, slow and far too complicated for its own good. Until now its saving grace was that it seemed to be reliable with our data. Now we've lost this. Hopefully temporarily, but if we can't recover the data from the offline backup things look grim for Daylite here.

Please help if you can. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

You can convert an existing offline database into an online database - do to so please refer to this knowledge base article.

Great - thanks Sebastien.

Is there any way to work out what has been changed (e.g. added) to a database after a certain date? i.e. It would be helpful if we could find what the 'new' stuff added since the database corruption took place has been - for although the old database has lost lots of contacts, there are others that have been added since...

Thanks in advance for guidance on this.

As the article suggests you can sync any other existing offlines that have data with the 'new' online once (backup first before doing so), but if you're wanting to pull the info from the 'old' online into the new one, that's not easily done (there's no way to 'merge' databases).

One way to do it would be to log into both databases, then sort items by creation date, then compare and re-enter the missing data manually.