[Nitecat]

Thanks so much to Norm who was kind enough to call me at home and resolve my problem. Of course it was a silly little oversight of mine (being a new user of Access).....I was looking at the last Book Id in each file, which happened to be the same and therefore thought the file was the same. Instead, with Norm's instruction, I learned to look at the total number of records showing at the bottom left corner. Turns out my 2 files were fine and I was able to proceed with comparing them to determine what Book Ids I was missing.

Just to let Norm and others know, after making the comparison, it turns out that the kma files missing were everything alphabetically after a certain point. This means that when I was backing up one external drive to the other and it quit midway, it was backing up the list of kma files alphabetically by file name. I could find what I have left by using Windows Explorer and looking at the folder directory where the files are saved plus using the 2 Access printouts of my songs.mdb files (file before and file after crash) sorted by BookId. The 2 Access printouts are also a great help to be sure the song title and artist names are the same as what I had before while reloading the lost kma files, which I am now in the process of doing.

I would suggest to everyone that they not only back up their kma files, but also have a backup of their songs.mdb file. Having my original song.mdb file has been a great help.

Norm, I hope what I am doing at this point is correct. I created a new folder on my external drive called reloaded songs. I changed where I am importing my files to this folder. I did this thinking that it would give me a way to keep the reloaded files separate for now. Just trying to be careful in case there is some need for me to have them separate from the others. I also thought it would make it simpler when I back up the reloaded songs up to my other external drives to not have them mixed in my the others. It will only be the songs in this folder that will need to be backed up because the others in my songs folder are already backed up.

One thing confuses me now, should I have deleted my songs.mdb file or any other files before I started importing the lost songs? I am importing on my show comnputer. It still contains the orginal songs.mdb file from before I lost part of the kma files from my external drive.

Here's what I was thinking.....once I'm sure I have all of my kma files again, I will move the reloaded songs so all my songs are in one folder on my external drive called songs. I will point Hoster to this folder. Then.....do I delete songs.mdb and rebuild the database? Is there anything else I should delete before rebuilding? Does this sound like it will get me back to where I need to be? Do I need to delete the artist and title rtf files and do a recreate on them? As you know, I've already printed my books and want the rtf files to match what was printed and I'd want Hoster to be set so that if I buy new music, it knows what to print for new release pages.

Guess that's all for now. I still get confused about how everything works together....the Access database, the kma files, rebuilding the songs database, what the other files are for like temp1.mdb etc. etc. In reading the boards here I finally figured out that if I edit the song title and artist name before importing a song, there is a header in the KMA file that retains this information? Is this correct? Rebuilding the songs database should take the header info. from my KMA files to use for the song title and artist name? I keep worrying about losing what I have edited on these. Guess that only happens if I lose the kma file as I did when my drive crashed and I wasn't totally backed up?

I realize this is long. Hope it makes sense. Let me know if what I have said is correct, if I'm doing anything wrong and/or if you have suggestions.

Again, thanks a bunch to Norm for saving me on this disaster of mine. Norm, it was great talking to you!! I owe you. Ruth