Reminded Me of Another Troubleshooter Suggestion - Microsoft Access Quick Queries #56


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Reminded Me of Another Troubleshooter Suggestion

Donald Blackwell

8 months ago

Another great video as always.

When you got to the section regarding troubleshooting and performance, it reminded me of another issue not directly spelled out in the troubleshooter -> External drives, especially USB and other portable devices. To Access these are very similar to network drives and/or online storage. I'm not sure about eSata or those type of devices but especially USB.

In the past I've had numerous databases get corrupted or start acting funky running them from a USB stick or even a USB external HDD. Even more so if running on a laptop on battery power. Like Google Drive, DropBox, etc, they're great for backups or if your don't have a reliable internet connection to transport a copy of your file, but if you're running from a USB device longterm, expect problems.

Case in point, if you have a database file open and step away from your pc for a bit and your device goes to sleep, you may likely get an error "Access was unable to connect to file on network drive [USBDEVICE]:"

Richard Rost @Reply

8 months ago

Donald Great point. External drives really do act a lot like network or cloud storage as far as Access is concerned, and they carry the same risks. Running a live database directly off a USB stick or portable hard drive is asking for trouble, especially if the machine goes to sleep or the drive hiccups. That's when you start seeing corruption and odd behavior.

USB and portable devices are fine for backups or moving a copy from one PC to another, but if you're planning to run your database long-term, keep it on a stable local drive or a proper server back-end. If you need portability, copy the file to your machine first, then copy it back when you're done. Treating USB like a live back-end is one of those "it might work for a while until it doesn't" situations.

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