Replicating with very old replicas

[CFord]

I heard this from someone and I wanted to know if it is true.

I had a NAB that had not replicated for about 102 days, I was told that if I start replicating it, because it hasn't replicated for more than 90 days, some old data may overwrite newer data on other servers as the replicator gets confused?

I thought this was wierd but just in case I burn't a newer copy on a CD and overwrote the very old as no changes are done to the NAB locally on that server.

Is this story true? Apparently it had happened before and old changes were replicated across the Enterprise so I didn't want to mess around and cause havoc.

Thanks

 

[pmonett]

That is correct. It has to do with deleting documents.
When you delete a document in a database, the document is removed, but a deletion stub is created. That stub is used to be replicated to other replicas of the db, in order for the deletion to take place across all replicas.
Notes has a cutoff date for deletion stubs, which is set to 90 days by default. Since your replica has not been updated for more than that, it is quite possible that documents that have been deleted since the last replication in other dbs still exist in your copy.
That means that the deletion stubs across the replica copies will have all been deleted.
Which means that any doc previously deleted that exists in your copy will "reappear" if you replicate again with that copy, since there is nothing to tell Notes that they should no longer be there.
However, there is nothing that will be "overwritten", since the new data does not exist in the old copy. Some replication conflicts may eventually show up, but nothing will be erased. Notes replication functionality is generally well done as far as data integrity is concerned.

Now, concerning a NAB, I would not bother replicating with a 100+ day old copy. If that NAB is that old, it is so out of date as to be useless in the replica scheme.
In other words, make a fresh replica from a valid copy, and overwrite the old one.
Eventually, you may wish to review the data in the NAB, to make sure that everything can be trashed. If any data is deemed important, you can always copy it to a valid replica.

Pascal.