Shapefile as a Multi User Editing Environment?

I had a ArcGIS user that I support come to me with a corrupted shapefile the other day. It had the old “number of shapes does not match number of table records” error. It turns out, he’s still using this shapefile as his layer’s main data source and he and several others regularly edit it! In this day and age?

I tried to convince him using a file geodatabase would be more stable for editing but he had been using shapefiles so long I don’t even think my comments registered. He just wanted a tool that could fix the shapefile.

I pointed him to the shapechk tool by Andrew Williamson. I’ve used the tool for years because <sarcasm>for some odd reason</sarcasm> I often run into people with corrupted shapefiles after people edit them over long periods of time. The shapefile works OK as a data exchange format but doesn’t always hold together under regular heavy use.

In the words of Pete Seeger, “when will we ever learn?”