Back up your Help Projects!

Although occurrences of corruption are rare, we highly suggest you take the time to frequently back up your data files. Help Builder automatically builds a <yourfile>_recover.hbp file whenever your project is opened successfully, but this file should only be used for emergency crash recovery.

We suggest you use the File | Backup Project option from time to time to back up your help file. Occasionally store this file into a safe location for permanent backup. Help files can get large with important data - losing this data can be very time consuming to reassemble. Better safe than sorry!!!

To back up your Help Project file click on the File menu followed by the Backup Help Project link and pick a file name to back up to. We suggest you do this frequently even if you don't have any problems.

Compacting and Reindexing

Help Builder includes a facility to compact and clean up help data files that contain invalid data.

There are two ways to access this functionality

On the menu using Cleanup Project
This option is accessible from the File menu. If the file is badly corrupted though you may have problems getting into the program to use this option.
Using the command line interface for wwhelp.exe
Help Builder also supports a command line interface for reindexing the data files. This operation checks for file inconsistencies as well as compacting the actual data files. To use this feature you can start Help Builder from the Command Box with:

wwHelp REINDEX

Select the file to work on in the file dialog.