Differences Between Safeguarded Compacts and the Standard Compact/Repair Function

Under some limited circumstances, a compact and repair process itself can actually damage a corrupt database beyond repair by truncating a table at the point of a corrupt record.

The Safeguarded compact prevents this from happening.

The steps taken in a Safeguarded compact are:

1. Attempt to compact the data file to another file name while leaving the original data file unchanged
2. Check that the number of tables is the same in the newly compacted file as in the original file (only data tables are counted, the comparison does not include Microsoft Access system tables)
3. Check that the number of records (rows) is the same in the newly compacted file as in the original file (only counting records in data tables. Records in Microsoft Access system tables are not counted)
4. Check to see if the compact process itself reported any errors
5. If all the above tests are passed, delete the original data file and rename the compacted file to the original data file name

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