We know how important the integrity of your Sage Accounts data is to you. Sage 50 data corruption is a serious risk to any business system and the resulting data loss or damage can be very costly in terms of time and money. You need to ensure that your data is protected against possible damage. We look at how to minimise the risk, recognise the warning signs and what steps to take if corruption has occurred.

Data corruption means that a data set has been damaged. In Sage Accounts, corruption is normally identified when the Check Data routine identifies errors in your data.

Corruption is normally caused by environmental influences outside of the software itself. The following are some of the known causes of corruption, although the list is not exhaustive:

• PC crashes
• Power surges
• Power failure
• Virus infection
• Interference from other software
• Hardware or network problems
• Faulty or damaged backup media

How does this affect my data?

Since data corruption indicates damaged or even missing data, to prevent the following impacts, you must resolve it as quickly as possible to prevent the following:

• Duplication of work – If data is lost, it must be re-entered and possibly re-reconciled, this is both time consuming and costly.
• Down time – If the data must be repaired off site then employees dedicated to data input may face a period of down time.
• Data loss – If previous backups have failed, data loss may be permanent and the entries must be reprocessed.
• Data integrity – Unreliable data affects the validity of business critical reports, including the VAT Return.