repair

Sage 50 File Repair & Data Recovery

Sage 50 will not open, or its own repair gave up? We recover the company file.

The situation

The company could not be opened because the file is missing or damaged.

That message, or on the Canadian side a blunt “Your data may be damaged,” is what brings most people here. Sometimes the file will not open at all. Sometimes it opens but throws errors, reports being out of balance, or behaves as though records have gone missing.

Either way, the accounting data is usually still in there. A company file that will not open is rarely an empty file - far more often it is intact records behind a broken wrapper, and the work is getting the records back out cleanly.

When Sage’s own repair has already given up

Sage 50 ships a repair tool, and by the time people reach us it has usually already been tried and failed.

• On Sage 50 US (Peachtree), every error eventually points you at “run Integrity Check.” The Integrity Check helps with some problems and quietly cannot fix others - files it reports “cannot be reindexed,” synchronization errors it tries to repair and does not, I/O and status-code errors that come back the next time you open the company.
• On Sage 50 Canadian (Simply Accounting), the program offers to repair the database itself and then reports “The program was not able to repair the database.” And its Check & Repair tool flatly refuses to run on a company that is shared in multi-user mode - which is exactly the setup most serious users run.

That “the built-in tool quit” moment is the point of this service. We work below the level the in-product repair reaches.

The two Sage 50 products are not the same repair

“Sage 50” is two unrelated products sharing a name, and a corrupt file behaves differently in each:

• Sage 50 US (Peachtree) stores your company as a set of data files on the Pervasive/Btrieve (Actian) engine, backed up as a .PTB. Damage shows up as I/O errors, Btrieve status codes, and indexes that will not rebuild.
• Sage 50 Canadian (Simply Accounting) stores your company as a .SAI file plus its .SAJ data folder on an embedded database, backed up as a .CAB. Damage shows up as “the database is not available,” “the data dictionary is corrupt,” or a file that is no longer recognised as a valid company at all.

We handle both, and we start by identifying which one you have so the recovery is done the right way.

What we can usually get back

The honest answer is that it depends on what damaged the file, and we do not know until we look. Commonly we recover from:

• a company file that will not open or is reported corrupt or damaged;
• records that survived but no longer tie out - out-of-balance general ledger, orphaned or duplicated entries, damaged employee or history data;
• a file the built-in Integrity Check or Check & Repair could not finish;
• a company left damaged by an interrupted process, a crash, or a bad network write.

We take a full copy first and work on that, so nothing we do can make the original worse.

What happens next

Send us the company file or a backup exactly as it is now - for US, zip the whole company folder or send the .PTB; for Canadian, zip the .SAI with its .SAJ folder or send the .CAB. Do not run another repair tool over it first, as a failed attempt can overwrite the structures we would otherwise read.

We will evaluate it and tell you what is recoverable, in what form, and what it costs before any work begins. The evaluation is free, and if we cannot recover your data there is no charge.

If the recovery is your cue to leave Sage 50 behind, say so - we also convert Sage 50 to QuickBooks and can recover and convert in one pass.