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How to Recover a Corrupt Catalog

If your catalog file has become corrupt and will not open normally, the Recover catalog command on the maintenance menu (Catalog/Info pop-out, the same panel as Backup and Optimize) can attempt to rebuild it into a new file.

If you have a recent backup, restoring the backup is usually the better option. Recovery is intended for the case where no usable backup exists.

What recovery does

Recovery reads what it can from the corrupt catalog and writes the readable parts into a new .vcat file. The original catalog file is not modified, so you can run recovery without risking the source.

Some data will likely be lost. How much depends on where the corruption is in the file.

Running it

  1. Click Recover catalog on the maintenance menu and confirm in the dialog.
  2. Pick where to save the recovered catalog. The default name is the source catalog name with a .recovered.vcat suffix.
  3. Wait. On large catalogs recovery can take hours.
  4. When recovery finishes, a summary is shown describing what was recovered.

We recommend saving the recovered catalog to a different drive than the source. A full disk can itself cause catalog corruption, and you do not want to fight the same disk-full condition while writing the recovered copy.

After recovery, open the new .vcat file to inspect the result. Keep the original corrupt catalog until you have confirmed the recovered copy is good.