You often hear the phrase “The best defence is a good offence.” Every once in a while you will encounter technical difficulties of some sort when working with Access that are beyond your control. You might be working with your database when the power goes out or you have an equipment failure with your machine. Viruses and other software threats also can cause data loss and corruption.

Fortunately Access and a number of other Microsoft applications have fairly robust error detection and correction services when something goes wrong. Every time you open a file in Access certain parts of the file are checked to ensure consistency. If an error is encountered, Access will attempt to repair the damaged or missing sections of data as best it can.