TECHNO TOPIC: Rare QuickBooks Errors Encountered

July 17, 2014

10:32 PM

Intuit: QuickBooks

Rebuild Unrecoverable Error

I was recently sent a QuickBooks Company file for analysis because the file not only failed to Verify but it also failed Rebuild with a critical fault [Unrecoverable Error – Code: 00000 50828] (seen in the headline illustration for this article). You won’t find that error number in any of the Intuit QuickBooks Technical Support KBAs.

I soon discovered that this was indeed a very ‘sick’ QuickBooks Company file with a lot of different problems including some ‘duplicate record numbers’, as shown in the QBWin.log excerpt below.:

LVL_ERROR--Duplicate Record Numbers found within this company file

Even though duplicate record numbers represent a serious form of corruption (which will cause Verify to fail), these were not the only (or most serious) problems existing within the file. We also found structural integrity errors including corruptions affecting various tables QuickBooks makes use of during its Rebuild routines.

Some of the errors we encountered are defined in Sybase as SQL Code error -110 which translates to an “Item “XXXXX” already existing”. As you can see from the log excerpt below, two (of several) of the tables showing this kind of corruption were the ‘all record numbers’ (all_recnums) table and the ‘duplicate records only’ (dups_recs_only) table.

LVL_ERROR--Unable to create a table in support of verify/rebuild. DB error code -110, Msg: Item 'vi_all_recnums' already exists

LVL_ERROR--Unable to create a table in support of verify/rebuild. DB error code -110, Msg: Item 'vi_dups_recs_only' already exists

These two tables (along with many others) are normally created within the database during the rebuild routines to allow any duplicate record numbers to be written to a temporary table so that their identities can be changed to a new record number before being written back to the appropriate table(s) with their corresponding data.

When the structural integrity of the database no longer supports the creation of the necessary temporary tables, the Rebuild utility cannot perform the necessary steps to resolve the duplicate record number repairs, as evidence by the errors seen below:

LVL_SEVERE_ERROR--Could not clean up temporary tables after verify/fix of database IDs

LVL_SEVERE_ERROR--Unexpected error in Duplicate ID verification. error code: -6184, msg: Deletion of one of the temporary tables required to identify/fix the 'duplicate ID' problem failed

These seem to be extremely rare forms of corruption. In researching these errors I spoke with my good friend and colleague, the old master of QuickBooks Data Repair, Shannon Tucker₁about these errors, Shannon told me that he “didn’t recall seeing this form of corruption before”.

I wanted you, our readers, to see examples of these Errors; while I believe this to be an isolated instance of a severely corrupted file it would be very beneficial to know if anyone else has encountered this type of corruption in recent history, and to ask you to keep an eye out for similar problems.

If you have seen these problems before, or you encounter them in the near future, I would ask that you contact me here at Intuitive Accountant with the details concerning such a file.

Murph

₁ - Shannon Tucker, is co-founder of AccountingUsers,Inc., a Colorado based company (not owned, operated or affiliated with Intuit); he has been specializing as a database consultant providing 3rd-party support resources for users of QuickBooks software since 1986.

Comments (4)

Comment Feed

Verify Data causing problems?

A client recently was told by Intuit support (not ProAdvisor level support) that they shouldn't run Verify Data unless they have known errors as running the Verify Data causes problems if there aren't any to begin with. This doesn't make sense to me, what do you think?
In this case, errors were found and Rebuild couldn't fix them so the client ended up sending their data file for repair with Intuit - a serious financial hardship for daily operations.
Thanks,

Karen Cook more than 9 years ago

Your Client probably misunderstood.....

Intuit has said for years that you should NOT run the REBUILD Utility unless there are known errors, that there is the possibility of corruption by doing so. But I have never heard anyone from Intuit (or seen any technical support information) on Not Running Verify.

Verify (in fact 'full verify') is a normal integrated part of the Internal QuickBooks process 'by default', you must manually option to not verify the data and Intuit emphasizes the importance of regular back-ups, even by default prompting you to back-up (including verify).

I think your client must simply have misunderstood.

As far as not running Rebuild, there are other times it should NOT be used. We know for example that if you have 'encryption errors', the Rebuild utility can actually cause them to increase and/or spread to other segments of encrypted data.

There are lots of situations where the QuickBooks Rebuild utility can not resolve corruption, but many of those circumstances can be resolved if the user can read and properly interpret the QBWin.log, and then make the necessary 'manual corrections' to affected transactions or list records. In those cases a Rebuild may not even be necessary after the corrections are made, and when the Verify is run, the utility ends cleanly.

The issues discussed in this article deal with some of the most ominous forms of corruption, structural integrity loss, but fortunately such problems are rare given the stability of the actual database structure itself.

Thanks for your comments, and thanks for reading Intuitive Accountant.

Murph

insightfulaccountant.com more than 9 years ago

Running Rebuild Regularly (i.e. weekly)

I have advised some QBES clients with 5- 10 users to regularly run rebuild (weekly) to avoid data corruption. Is this a bad idea. Should they just run verify weekly? Is this the same verify that gets run with automatic full back ups?

Steve Bradely more than 9 years ago

Never Run Rebuild without a specific Reason

You really should NOT run the rebuild reason without having a very specific reason, and that reason should usually take the form of a 'Verify' that does not end with the message "QuickBooks found no problems with your data', of a QBWin.log file that clearly shows data errors that can in fact be corrected by use of Rebuild.

Many QuickBooks errors can not be corrected using the Rebuild Utility, the values that are mismatched are not computational in nature, they are user defined errors. In these cases the fix is also manual (or comes from a source other than Rebuild).

In some cases Rebuild can actually damage your data, for example the 'encryption/decryption' errors that have become common in QB 2013 and 2014 can be made significantly worse by using Rebuild. A few corruption errors can quickly turn into 100's via a Rebuild in some cases.

The Verify utility should be run regularly, and typically as part of an 'internal QuickBooks Backup' (with the option for full verification). If this fails to complete, then you are ready to start the process of diagnosing what is wrong with the data using both the Verify Utility and QBWin.log file as your references. Only when you are certain you should in fact 'run Rebuild', should you do so.

Best of luck,

Murph

insightfulaccountant.com more than 9 years ago