Overview
You should not use any update scheme or maintenance scheme which could force an SQL server and/or the M-Files Server computer to restart without properly shutting down the services. Such forced shutdown can cause files, and worse yet, the database(s) to become corrupt to a level where recovery without backups is not possible.
If there is a need to force a shutdown of such computer or service and the situation does not get resolved by waiting, do your best to bring everything down gracefully:
- take all the vaults offline (use multiple M-Files Admin tool instances if taking a vault offline seems to hang) - note that under some circumstances it may take excessive amount of time for a vault to go offline if there is a very long running (background) operation ongoing
- take the MS SQL databases offline (force closing connections if needed)
- there may be some loss of data due to the forced connection closure, but the system should roll back all transactions and remain usable if succeeded
Allow the system at the end some minutes - the longer the better - of time to write possible cached data to the disks before forcing a process/computer shutdown.
The best protection towards these kinds of situations is having fresh and verified backups.
