What Causes Master Builder Data Corruption?

Those Sage Master Builder users that read their original installation instructions (and you might be surprised at how few actually bothered to read the installation instructions!) may remember an instruction to Turn Off Write Behind Caching. Too often, when working with a client that has experienced data corruption evidenced by General Ledger Audit errors, we find that Write Behind Caching is not turned off. Sometimes we find that it was never turned off on a particular machine, or the machine was recently replaced and they forgot to turn off the caching when they installed Sage Master Builder, or a well-meaning computer technician turned caching back on while trying to improve the perceived performance of a computer.

What is Write Behind Caching? Write Behind Caching is a technique used by the Windows operating system to improve the perceived speed of a computer. If a computing process includes a significant amount of writing data to a hard drive (which is a relatively slow process) and there are other processes to be performed, the operating system may decide to hold the data that is to be written to the hard drive in RAM or volatile memory until the operating system decides that it now has the time to write the data to the hard drive.

This can create real problems for most accounting programs that involve complicated postings or writing data to a hard drive. When Master Builder saves an accounting transaction, there are often a large number of posting or writing processes involved. If the entire transaction, with all of its data postings, is not completely and timely written to the hard drive, the data may not be available for use by another concurrent user. If part of a transaction is being held in the cache of computer that suddenly loses communication with the hard drive to which the data is to be written (as with a file server), the complete transaction may never get posted into the data files and data corruption, including unbalanced transactions and unposted updates to records, may result.

The long and short of it is simple – turn off the Write Behind Caching on each machine that uses Sage Master Builder! The nearly imperceptible loss of processing speed is a small price to pay for reducing or eliminating data corruption and those pesky audit errors.

Feel free to send us a note if you need help in checking your Write Behind Caching status.