Recovering from a BSD crash / missing messages

[peakquester]

Hi Wilson -- am sure you're busy with the latest hubbub out of Yahoo, but wanted to ask you advice on a crash recovery.  My w2k box is prone to occasional blue screens of death crashes, and one hit me as I remember it during a download a few months ago.  When I reopened, I discovered my largest group, about 20k messages, the one to which I was downloading at the time, had gone empty on me, though at bottom it identifies an approximately correct message count.  Other groups display fine.  

I once backed up the entire programs folder, and I did not download anything following the crash in hopes of simplifying recovery, though I did open the application.  Can I use the backup folder to recover, and if so, how do I go about it --  would deleting and restoring the entire folder (mdb file was maybe 380m) create some kind of registry problems or anything?  

Thanks when you get to replying.  I'm a big fan of the software, will try to recommend it when I can, so cheers to you for it.  

[Wilson Logan]

OK, I run Win2k also, but mine has been rock solid (touch wood) for about 3 months.

PGO uses Access databases (in hindsight, not an error I'd make twice) which do not like being shutdown externally. If you have Access you can open the ygroups.mdb file and try Compact & Repair from the tools menu of Access. That might fix all your problems.

Failing that, you can simply overwrite your knackered ygroups.mdb file with your good backup. The database is entirely self contained (references only internally) so you will get away with this.

Cheers,

Wilson.