Lotus deleted almost all of my entries

[JCorica]

Inthe office I work at, there is a main database of all our customers. I needed to send out a mailing to a specific group of these customers. I thought the easiest way to narrow down the mailing would be to:
-Make a copy of the database from another computer on the network onto my pc and RENAME it,
-run searches for duplicate entries (names, addresses) and delete all but one of each duplicate
-search the remaining entries for the criteria I needed and print labels.

The problem is that Approach deleted the duplicates in BOTH databases, the MAIN one that everyone uses AND the copy I maddeon my PC. Why would this happen? This is very bad. I guess I have to give up on trying to retrieve the old data. what can I do to avoid this in the future???

 

[Thomasdelta]

I would guess that the database could have been joined to others. When you copied the database, the joins remained intact.
This could explain why they were all deleted.
Depending on how often you need to do this, I would probably export the information into a spreadsheet and then manipulate it as required.
(Probably not the best solution, but it certainly works for me!!)

As for retrieving the data, the only way I would know of is to check with your IT support to see if they have backups of the required database.
Our IT support takes backups every night. If we need something restored, we just give them a date and file location and they do the rest. (obviously you lose any changes made since that date)

Good luck.

I read a book once called '101 Things to do in Binary'.
It was the best 5 things I ever read.