Tree Corruption

[JDWheatley]

I recently had to reload my entire main tree, from scratch.

The cause of this was a strange corruption in the links, despite the fact that I used the same source for producing the GEDCOM file on each of six separate imports, using the same IDs (as far as I know).

I use FTM with a standard export to GEDCOM.

The problem manifested itself as individuals appearing as their own descendants, as well as individuals acquiring multiple spouses from very separate parts of the tree.

There were several instances of this problem, and attempting to fix these manually (in TNG) just seemed to make the problem worse.

As a result of the reload I noticed a couple of things:

I reloaded by basically creating a new tree, and then, afterwards, clearing down the corrupted tree. I noticed that this did not actually remove the old records from the database.

I removed those manually (using phpmyadmin and appropriate SQL queries) and also changed the gedcom field on the photo links file and renamed the "portrait thumbnails".

All the photos tied-up, since all the IDs were still the same.

Anyway, hope that I don't have to go through that too often. Maybe I should have written a couple of php scripts to automate the SQL for it all