Hi,

after last restart I got following message starting up skype:

"Skype has experienced a database error. Please make sure your profile files in ~/Skype are intact and have proper permissions then restart Skype."

Looks like this is pretty rare experience for skype, I could not find any reference in web on skype profile corruption.

How can I make sure that my profile files are intact?

Is there some tool to find out what is wrong with them? Visually I can see, that all the files are longer than zero bytes and have the date of last shutdown.

Worst that could have happened is that Skype process got killed before it could finish writing some chat logs or other such data, config files look pretty much as in last backup.

Is there some tool to find out and fix some minor errors so that database files and config files would have consistent data, or is only option to empty ~/.Skype and loose all data just because something got LITTLE BIT out of sync during last shutdown?

I am ready to copy whole profile to windows and run the profile fix there, if there is no linux tool for it.

--
Linux 2.6.15-gentoo-r7 #1 PREEMPT Fri Mar 31 08:50:34 UTC 2006 x86_64 AMD Athlon™ 64 Processor 3500+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

skype-1.3.0.30-r1

Just delete it... Shouldn't give too much of a problem. You could potentially leave the chat histories there, but otherwise, there shouldn't be too much of a problem...

Little update:

I found some instructions about deleting config.xml in profile folder, presumably skype would rebuild it.

Well, seems it's REALLY some corrupt .db file, because after authorization attempt i get the same error:

"Skype has experienced a database error. Please make sure your profile files in ~/Skype are intact and have proper permissions then restart Skype."

and login is failed after this.

So it seems skype is trying to look into my chat history databases, but after encountering the error, still just reports it without taking any other action or proposing any other solutions.

This is kind of disappointlment.

I know there can be many different things wrong with files once they get messed up, but some basic recovery procedure could still extract everything until the point of corruption and go from there..

any other options? ( yes i still have old configuration backed up :wink: )

[quote=Prins@je80]Just delete it... [/quote]

delete what.. whole profile?!? sounds kind of silly.

I'm quite fond of my chats and they are in kind of perverse format, so it's not exactly readable in plain text eighter without skype exporting it specially into HTML in IMHistory folder.

Should I really start extracting messages from there myself or what?!

I don't believe I'm the first person who "experienced" it together with skype, and after all those years the only option is to erase whole profile folder?!! It's not like everything is lost or my hard drive crashed, it's still all there, something just got out of sync.. shold be trivial to check it and throw away the corrupted record or two from the end of some file..

It can't be that hopeless or stupid request?!

Weird, mosly weird:

* first I moved away WHOLE profile folder.
* Then logged in, got some rudimentary contacts ( i guess only ungrouped ones )
* after that i closed skype program, copied only .dbb files and index2.dat file back to profile folder
* started up skype and everything seemed ok, got all contacts back, all logs back ( at least most recent ones i could remeber from the day )

looks like everything is fine!

At least this experience taught me to put ~/.Skype and ~/.gaim folders to daily backup list.

I hope my wasted hours help some other unlucky skype users, who happen to "experience" something similar, even though i have no idea, where the error really was, I just used my intuition about computers trying to work out things step by step.. and somehow those steps worked out.

Obviosuly there is SOME sort of profile recovery happening in skype, but what exactly happened will be known only to some smugly grinning skype developer.. probably only few kilometers away from me.. sleeping right now.. bastard :shock: .

If profile and most of personal info is really stored with users, like it's stated in security statement, then it should be really POLLITE of skype to release some profile repair&recovery tool or to integrate a bit more better or more interactive recovery process directly with client to avoid such silly situations.

I had this same problem while upgrading to the 1.3.0.37 BETA. Once I installed it, I got the database error you are talking about. I solved it slightly differently so I'll tell you how.

- I renamed the ~/.Skype folder
- Opened Skype so that it generated the basic ~/.Skype but didn't log in and closed Skype
- I copied over the 3 files I had in my renamed ~/.Skype directory but not the folder with my username
- I now opened Skype again and now it complained about the password not being correct so I closed it
- Copied over the folder for my user and opened Skype again
- Now everything was magically solved

I still have the problem that I believe at least some Gentoo users have which is having to set /opt/Skype/Skype's SUID bit in order to be able to use Skype without crashing.

I've also had the error :
"Skype has experienced a database error. Please make sure your profile files in ~/Skype are intact and have proper permissions then restart Skype."

My problem was that a previous instance of Skype still had the files open, preventing a current instance of Skype from using them. I got into this mess by not closing Skype properly, killing previous skype processes sorted it out for me.

I agree, this problem started happening again to me and by looking at the processes running on the system I spotted several related to Skype. After killing those, the problem was solved.

I haven't, as far as I remember, closed skype incorrectly before this happened (twice in a day), so I'll assume there must be a bug that prevents Skype to close all it's running processes when one closes it normally.

Hi I got the same problem on Feisty Fawn, but it works fine when I run it form root. I think the issue was when I first ran Skype after installation I ran it on a terminal as root and that caused some permission problems to the .Skype when I tried to run it as a normal user. Tried setting permissions to the files but never worked. I just deleted the .Skype and then ran skype as a normal user and then it works fine. Onlything I had no chat history to loose, so no big issue for me.

I think that could be the problem, may be not!