Access 2016 for Beginners Part 16: Compact and Repair an Access 2016 Database

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During this Microsoft Access 2016 training tutorial video, we will talk about how to compact and repair a database. This is very useful in repairing corrupted files or broken databases without having to restore them.
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Welcome back to our course on Access 2016.
In the preceding section we talked about backups. And it’s absolutely essential that you get a backup regime in place before your Access databases start having too much of your time and effort invested into them. Something else you need to know about is the fact that over time Access databases can become what we call bloated. I’ll come back to bloated in a moment. And also over time you may get to situations where your databases get broken in some way. Now I mentioned databases getting broken in the preceding section in relation to needing to restore a database. But sometimes when a database gets broken it’s possible to repair it without having to restore. So in this section we’re going to talk about compact and repair.
Now once again there’s a very good Help topic that gives you the background information on compact and repair. And first of all let’s talk about compact.
Now as it says here database files grow with use. Generally speaking as you store more and more data it’s not surprising that an ACCDB file gets bigger. But when you delete records from tables in an Access database the space is not automatically reclaimed. It just occupies what is in effect empty space. There are also various pieces of coded data that Access uses when it’s working on a database. And over time some of these which strictly speaking could be deleted are not deleted. And we get this effect called Bloat. And in order to remove the unneeded, unused, wasted space you compact a database. And compacting not only reduces the size of the database file but it can improve the speed of performance as well.
Now the other factor here is that database files can become corrupted. There are various ways that corruption can happen. Many of them are associated with an incomplete write to a database. So you only get part of some data written to a database. There are some ways of minimizing the chance of this happening but it still happens from time to time and there are certain situations when it happens most often. For instance if you’re using a network database and a network connection is broken, maybe you’re connected to a database over a network and your connection is broken. You might also, for instance, have a situation where you’re using linked tables that I explained earlier in the course. And the database or computer or server which is holding the tables you’re linked to gets rebooted. Somebody doesn’t realize that somebody else is linked to those tables. So that computer gets restarted and corruption occurs.
Now if a database file becomes corrupted sometimes Access will realize that corruption has happened and it will prompt you to repair the database file. Sometimes it doesn’t realize that the database is corrupted. Sometimes you’ll be able to carry on happily working on a database for a long period of time doing lots of things to it without realizing that it’s actually corrupted.
Now one way of dealing with both the bloat problem and any corruptions is to run a process called Compact and Repair. Now you would definitely run this if Access said that it believed that there was a corruption. But you should also run it as part of a general regular maintenance procedure.
Now to run a compact and repair it’s actually pretty straight
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