Grep'ing FileMaker Recovery Logs

When you run Recovery (File->Recover…) on a FileMaker database file, everything checked and any errors are logged in the
\nRecovery.log file. In a large file you may get lots of output however, so sifting through this in a text editor isn’t the greatest option. A common technique is to import the log into FileMaker or Excel, it imports nicely in both. Here however I’ll show how you can use the grep command to quickly summarize issues.

A few basics to cover about recovery first.

If I was thinking that I might be keeping the recovered version of the file, but still want to drop indexes and clean up the data structure a bit I’d use a less radical version of Advanced Recovery Options. These options are likely to help clean up a number of common issues, and not likely to introduce any new ones:

But if I’m mainly interested in thoroughly checking if the file has problems I’d use settings like these:

This last set of options is apt to give you the most thorough verification, but the recovered file shouldn’t be used for anything other than salvaging data without some careful consideration.

Once the recovery is done, you are left with a rather lengthy recovery log, and the grep command is just about the perfect tool to quickly locate any possible problem spots.

grep -v -B2 \"\\t0\\t\" path/to/Recover.log

References

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• Setting advanced file recovery options
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• Damaged files
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• Damaged layouts
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