Lotus Notes 5
Some documents simple disappeared.
None has the right of deletion.
Starting some months ago suddenly some documents just vanish.
Subject: Missing documents
Subject: RE: Missing documents
Willy, that’s just not true. Notes is extremely reliable in this way.
Yes, fixup can delete documents, just as fixing disk errors with scandisk can delete files. If the data on disk is corrupt there’s a limit to what any software can do to make the error go away without losing anything. Notes’ system supporting the replacement of fixup-deleted documents through replication is better than most at dealing with the issue. If you have multiple replicas the problem is dealt with automatically; and why would anyone not take this elementary precaution?
If documents are disappearing, there’s a reason for it. Possibly something (or someone) is setting Readers fields in them so that they’re no longer visible to most users (including the database manager). Possibly they are getting deleted, e.g. by some agent deleting them (but in that case the user history records this). Possibly they are just getting modified in such a way that they no longer match the selection criteria for any views.
Whatever, there’s a specific reason they’re vanishing, and steps you can take to figure out why and make them reappear if they’re not really deleted. Documents do not simply vanish on their own.
Subject: RE: Missing documents
Subject: RE: Missing documents
“Willy, that’s just not true.”> So I’m a liar? You know for a fact that I’ve never experienced what I described?
Say rather that I take your word for it that you’ve seen documents apparently vanishing, but it sounds like you assumed this was due to unreliability of the product, when in fact there were probably other causes that you failed to find.
“Notes’ system supporting the replacement of fixup-deleted documents through replication is better than most at dealing with the issue.”
Most systems use a transaction log.
The Domino server also has transaction logging capability, in addition to replication, so we’re covered in multiple ways.
'If documents are disappearing, there’s a reason for it. Possibly something (or someone) is setting Readers fields in them so that they’re no longer visible to most users (including the database manager). Possibly …
You can’t possibly be talking to me.
Mainly I was responding to the original post here, but based on your troubleshooting procedure outlined below, you haven’t covered all the bases, so yes, I guess I am talking to you.
I look for documents by their UNIDs, by their assigned unique keys, and as replication conflicts. When my monitor tells me a doc is gone…it’s gone.
In the steps you list here, I see the following points you missed:
The document may have a Readers item in it that prevents you from seeing it. You would never see it on your monitor in that case; you would have to use full access administration mode to find it. Your agent to check for missing documents, would also be unable to detect such documents. Please note that any user who can edit a document, can restrict read access to it, even if your design doesn’t explicitly provide that function.
The document may have been legitimately deleted by some process, for instance an agent, or by a user who has more access than is good for them. The user history is good for detecting this, or you could check the transaction log that you don’t think exists.
There may be other things you should check that I’m not thinking of offhand. Based on what you yourself said above, it sounds like you never look into these possibilities, but simply assume that any document you can’t find has vanished because Domino is unreliable. I’ve never encountered a document that simply vanished with no discernible cause and no evidence of its passing.
You know, we have a lot of big Notes databases here in IBM, many of them containing frequently edited rich text, like the documents you say cause problems. We get email notices with doclinks to these documents. People are assigned the documents in their work queue. There are references and links to them from other documents. If anything vanished, people would notice. I’m talking about, for instance, our PMR and SPR databases, where we handle support requests and bug reports. For every one of these documents, there’s at least one interested party who would miss it if it were gone, and integration points with other systems where a missing ID would be noted and logged during synchronization. And even with multiple replicas, if a document simply vanishes in one replica, the replication history would keep it from being replaced during replication if it had not also been modified in another replica since the last replication. We are not having the problems you describe, and never have had them. If what you say is true, we should be seeing this constantly.
Subject: RE: Missing documents
It was not my intention to cause such a discussion. Anyway, does anyone know what situation can cause a corrupt document?
I work with Notes since 1994 in many Companies and it is the first time I have this situation, and it happens only in one database. This database has rules, but documents do not have Readers or Authors files.
One fact is the db structure has many updates, more than I have seemed before in any Company I had work.
Thanks.
Subject: RE: Missing documents
Subject: RE: Missing documents
…there are no reader fields in the forms of my dbs, and users don’t know how to add security to a document.
Oh. My. God.
Do you want to… rephrase that? Because it sounds to me like you just said, “I have total contempt for the intelligence of end users. None of them remember anything from their Notes client training, and none of them have the initiative to noodle around on their own and find the document properties security tab.”
So, it still sounds to me like you’re just assuming this is the case, and haven’t bothered to check. Of course, you must be correct that no end user could possibly be using the document security settings. Still, it sounds eerily to me like exactly what would happen if someone did do that.
Even though it’s clearly impossible, perhaps, just for purposes of due diligence, you should just check whether that might be the case. Just to prove me wrong.
Because even though your end users might be fools, you know what they say about the ingenuity of fools…
Subject: RE: Missing documents
Subject: RE: Missing documents
That has not been my experience. Like you I’ve been using Notes for a very long time. In 18 years of use, I have yet to lose a document.
Subject: RE: Missing documents
Subject: RE: Missing documents
Believe me, I know if documents go missing from my dbs. As I said, I personally have never experienced this in my 18+ years. Actually I tell a lie, I did see this back in 1991 when I wasn’t fully up to speed with Notes and I put a database on a file share and had people access it that way. So it is possible to screw notes databases if some notes unaware process access notes dbs “locally” whilst a server is using the same db.