Anti data store corruption

How do I prevent datastore corruption?

I’ve been developing for a while but I just started learning about data stores.
I’ve experienced problems with data stores such as data not saving or loading properly, how do I fix this? do I use pcall function if so, how and in what way?

People have already done your work for you, use DataStore2 or ProfileService.

1 Like

There’re multiple solutions to this problem, though the most popular solutions are Datastore2 and ProfileService

It might not be necessarily corruption, there may be an issue with your datastore script.

Check out these threads:

DataStore corruption is rare and shouldn’t happen that often. If you’re using UpdateAsync and not SetAysnc you seldom see data corruption. However, if you do not have a robust and stable data management system you could see occasional problems.

It is rare but I am working on a game with multiple data stores and we expect to have 100’s of players due to us advertising it, so I do not want players losing their data. I want 100% prevention from this.

I’ve never personally understood why people say that SetAsync is bad when can’t you use pcall and check if the data is supposed to be there w/ no errors?

I have never seen data corruption.

From what I know ProfileService doesn’t even deal with that, from my understanding it just works by checking if there’s something missing or extra in data. Or if the data doesn’t fit the format, etc. I don’t consider it corruption handling, more like normal checks. ProfileService doesn’t even advertise that at all on the DevForum page or documentation soo…

I’ve used a pcall function and for i function loop to loop through all the leaderstats but it ends up saying I’ve reached the maximum limit to data store request when loading or saving

Pcalls and SetAsync have no correlation. SetAsync overwrites data with anything you pass. If you pass nil to SetAsync, your data is gone. If you call pcall with SetAsync, pcall would just prevent the rest of the script failing, but wouldn’t prevent the SetAsync from overwriting the data store.

Edit: This was a rushed response but basically: SetAsync’s are bad because they open up more doors to overwrite data. UpdateAsync’s are good because it gives you the current data, allowing you to change specific properties instead of overwriting the entire schema.

1 Like

You could use backups, which check if the Saved Data is nil and try to get the value of the backup’s saved value, and set it to the (e.g.) leaderstats value. You would have to make a new datastore with something like "BackupStore"..Store.Name and set it to the same value as the normal data store when (e.g.) the player is leaving.

If DataStores are corrupted its usually occurs at the time you save data. This means that after saving the data you can check to make sure it has the correct value (Dont do it too often as it doubles datastore use for saving).

Keeping backups would be wise as mentioned by @THECOOLGENERATOR but they are only there should all else fail.

1 Like