I successfully downloaded 10.2 on two side by side computers on my desk. All the databases that I’ve tried open and work as expected, except one.
My address book database won’t open on one computer, but works on the other. The file is stored on Dropbox, like all my utilities, and has been in use for a long time. I tried to save as a new copy of the working version and it has the same error, but both the original and new version work on the second computer.
It may have originated when I tried to open the file and got the error, then looked at the second computer and saw I left the address book file open sitting on the desktop and forgot about it. Otherwise, no idea what’s different. The error comes up on an M1 iMac running Big Sur, while the working one is an old iMac running Mojave.
The error message is shown below. Does anyone know what’s going on and how to clear the problem?
You should start by reading the topics that Dave referred you to, but let me supply some additional information.
If you’re using Dropbox or another file sharing system, you have to be extremely careful to make sure that you don’t open the same database on two computers at once. In fact you really need to allow for a delay after closing before opening on another computer, to make sure that Dropbox has time to fully synchronize. If the file is partially synchronized, BAM, your database is corrupted.
The good news is that Panorama X 10.2 will now notice this corruption immediately and refuse to open the file. Previous versions would just blithely plunge ahead, oblivious to the corruption, possibly causing problems down the road.
Of course the best solution is to not use Dropbox for sharing Panorama database files, but instead use Panorama Server, which was built for this task and is now available. Then you don’t have to worry about being careful about opening and closing databases.
Even if you are careful, you’ll still run into corruption errors if you have different computers with a mix of 10.2 and 10.1. The best solution is just to make sure that all computers are running 10.2, but if for some reason that isn’t possible, you’ll need to disable integrity checks.
Thanks to both Dave and Jim for the insight. I’m going back and forth between old and new computers and I’m sure I switched over to the new one before synchronization finished as I was testing 10.2 version. I’ll dig up a backup copy for now and consider using the server at some point in the not-to-distant future.
