A power surge or power spike. This causes your company data records to become "scrambled" as they are written to the hard drive. Data corruption can be caused by:
A power surge or power spike. This causes your company data records to become "scrambled" as they are written to the hard drive.
It is always a good idea to use an uninterrupted power supply (UPS), or power conditioner to prevent power problems. An inexpensive powerboard with a surge protector can give you a false sense of security and is only marginally better than nothing. A UPS not only protects your power supply from surges and spikes, but also protects you from power outages by providing power for a period long enough to safely shut down your computer.
A General Protection Fault (GPF) that makes you reset or turn the computer off without being able to shut it down correctly.
Turning off the computer before you have exited or shut down MS-Windows.
Running several MS-DOS programs in the background under MS-Windows. This is because some MS-DOS based programs do "illegal" file operations and can cause Windows to become "confused" as to where it is placing the file.
Your hard drive has become corrupted or damaged and your Elite Payroll file is now residing on top of the corruption or damaged. This means that Elite Payroll is unable to read your company data correctly.
A virus has infected your company data file and has caused damage to your company data.
Your hard drive is compressed with a program such as DriveSpace, DoubleSpace or Stacker.
You're running an anti-virus program that doesn't allow Elite Payroll to fully write the data file to the hard drive.
You're running a disk-caching program AND you turn off the computer before the caching software has had a chance to fully write your data file to the hard drive. Generally you should wait several minutes before turning off a computer that is running caching software OR disable the write caching in the software.