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Corruption in an MS Access database can occur because of a number of factors, acting together or separately. For example, sudden power outages, interruption in network operations, malicious or virus attacks, software problems and system shutdowns can all lead to errors in the MDB files. So can poor database designing, operating systems that have not been updated and poor programming techniques. So long as the corruption levels are manageable, you can quickly use Microsoft Access utilities such as 'Compact and Repair' to repair the MDB files and to make Access work more efficiently. However, if the Access database gets seriously corrupted, only advanced solutions such as Advanced Access Repair from DataNumen may be able to recover Access data. These tools use fairly sophisticated technologies to scan even seriously damaged MDB files to restore Access data.

Let us look at what steps we can take to protect our database and data from corruption:

·        Access often needs to store a lot of temporary data when you make use of nested queries or similar complex queries. The more the temporary data, the more work the Jet database engine has to do. This reduces the efficiency of Access; moreover, if for some reason Access freezes during the process of working on the temporary data, your backend file may end up becoming corrupted. The best solution to avoid this kind of corruption is to store the temporary data in temporary tables. This way the more important data stays protected; you can recover Access data more easily and also speed up queries.

·        WAN connections are always vulnerable to connectivity problems. If your local machine is connected to a server through the Internet, can cause problems both while reading and writing to the database. While it may take you a long time to read the database, you might still find that acceptable so long as no real damage is caused to the database. On the other hand, when you are writing to the database, any problems in the connection could immediately lead to errors in the database. For example, if there are bottlenecks in the Internet traffic and this causes an interruption in the data transfer, Access could time out believing that the Internet connection has been lost. Invariably this causes serious damage to the database files and you may find it difficult to recover Access data.

·        You should make sure that you are regularly updating both your software and hardware. Using the latest service packs, make sure that all bugs in the software you are using are fixed and security loopholes are plugged. Similarly, upgrading network equipment will ensure that problems in the database do not arise due to faulty cables or network interface cards.