# Error Recovery Policy

During startup the EMS server can encounter a number of errors while it recovers information from the store files.

Potential errors include:

- Low-level file errors. For example, corrupted disk records.
- Low-level object-specific errors. For example, a record that is missing an expected field.
- Inter-object errors. For example, a session record with no corresponding connection record.

When the EMS server encounters one of these errors during startup, the recovery policy is:

- By default, the server exits startup completely when a corrupt disk record error is detected. Because the state can not be safely restored, the server can not proceed with the rest of the recovery. You can then examine your configuration settings for errors. If necessary, you can then copy the store and configuration files for examination by TIBCO Support.
- You can direct the server to delete bad records by including the `-forceStart` command line option. This prevents corruption of the server runtime state.
- The server exits if it runs out of memory during startup.

It is important to backup the store files before restarting the server with the `-forceStart` option, because data will be lost when the problematic records are deleted.

Keep in mind that different type of records are stored in the store files. The most obvious are the persistent JMS Messages that your applications have sent. However, other internal records are also stored. If a consumer record used to persist durable subscriber state information were to be corrupted and later deleted with the `-forceStart` option, all JMS messages that were persisted (and valid in the sense that they were not corrupted) would also be lost because the durable subscription itself would not be recovered.

When running in this mode, the server still reports any errors found during the recovery, but problematic records are deleted and the recovery proceeds. This mode may report more issues than are reported without the `-forceStart` option, because without that flag the server stops with the very first error.

Warning: We strongly recommended that you make a backup of all store files before restarting the server with the `-forceStart` option. The backup is useful when doing a postmortem analysis to find out what records were deleted with the `-forceStart` option.
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