Mac FileMaker Recovery Using Scan and Rebuild Feature of Advanced Recovery Options

FileMaker Pro 12 is the most recent version of FileMaker Relational Database Management System. The newer version has a number of advancements and feature improvements, over the earlier versions. One such feature is the FileMaker recovery. FileMaker Pro 12 has an advanced recovery mechanism that allows you to repair a damaged FileMaker database effectively.

When you run the FileMaker repair process on the database using advanced recovery options, it creates a new database. While setting up the recovery options, you can choose how the scan and rebuild process would work on the resulted database. FileMaker Pro provides you the following four options that you can use:

1. Scan record data and rebuild fields and tables - This option rebuilds the schema of new database. It forces all the database fields and records to be scanned. It is a time consuming process, but this is the only option, which recreates missing table and field definitions. It finds and removes the records and fields, which are at invalid locations in file.
2. Scan and rebuild scripts, layouts etc. - This option rebuilds the complete structure of the FileMaker database file.
3. Rebuild field indexes: Choose Now or Later- This option rebuilds the field indexes while recovering the file, or later while indexes are required.
4. Delete cached settings – This option deletes the current settings, including layout formatting, page format, and print settings.

The above options are very helpful in performing the complete recovery of damaged database. However, there are some situations, where you may not get the desired results using inbuilt recovery feature. Such cases include severe database damage, database schema corruption, and database structure corruption.

At this point, you have to use the comprehensive third-party database recovery tools, which work in all cases of corruption. They offer absolute recovery of all your significant data.