Strange dimension corruption

[Harvey]

I just had a strange problem. I shut down my local TM1 server and fired it back up to find some of the dimensions had been corrupted. This caused the server start-up time to increase, and despite waiting several hours, it never seemed to start up successfully.

Of course, I couldn't log in to examine the issue, but, while loading particular dimensions, the start up log mentioned ignoring duplicate elements with garbage element names, and also complained about being unable to save rules that were working previously due to missing elements.

I replaced a few dimensions from backup and the model was was back to normal.

Has anyone else experienced this, or should I start to worry about the integrity of the hard drive I'm running my server from?

[lotsaram]

sounds a bit twilight zone, never seen anything like this myself.

[iansdigby]

Could someone have accessed the dimension via an .xdi file, illegitimately or accidentally, and overwritten it without your realising?

[Harvey]

Could someone have accessed the dimension via an .xdi file, illegitimately or accidentally, and overwritten it without your realising?

Good thought, but it's my own development model, running on my laptop inside a virtual machine, so it's not a multi-user environment.

[Duncan P]

Just a shot in the dark but you hadn't by any chance used SwapAliasWithPrincipalName had you? I've never used it but I seem to remember health warnings about it.