I'm trying to determine what is causing, and how to prevent, data corruption that is occurring in a secure, PGP encrypted environment. I am one of the primary users of the system, and not an administrator. I have looked for solutions in the past, to no avail.
Background: I work for a commercial mailer, and one of our clients is a financial institute, so we are required to process their data in an encrypted environment, according to PCI (Payment Card Industry) regulations. We use PGP on Windows Server. I believe it's 2012, but I am not positive. We recently upgraded the system by doing a complete server replacement. We log onto the system from a handful of dedicated PCs, most of which run Vista, but at least one runs Windows 7 64-bit. The data is stored and manipulated on a mapped drive on the server. We use Visual Foxpro to access the data, and run counts and reports on it. The data is stored in .dbf files we create from text files.
Occasionally we would get corruption, usually in the .dbf files, but also in other, plain text files created by other software we use. Typically the corruption appears as nulls at the end of a file, or garbage replacing part or all of multiple records, located together in the .dbf. Sometimes the corruption in the text files only occurred when the file was copied to another directory.
Today, I had it happen again, for the first time since the server upgrade a few months ago. In both cases, the corruption occurred at the end of a .dbf. The first time, the data was replaced with random binary data when the file was closed. This was repeatable. Eventually, I copied and pasted the data from the original text file, which fixed it. The second time the corruption also happened repeatedly, even when the dbf in question was recreated and processed in a new directory. The data at the end of the file was replaced with users full names and binary data. The only thing that was done to the .dbf was that a temporary index was created for matching to another file, and then later deleted. The corruption happened either when the index was deleted, or when the file was closed. I have begun to suspect that it could be an issue with the file access table, reporting the wrong file size, but I'm not 100% certain, due to the corruption occasionally occurring in the middle of a .dbf.
My manager has been stumped. He said this occurred somewhat frequently, and more severely, a couple years ago, before I started working in the secure environment. He also mentioned that when they did an upgrade on the PGP software, the issues went away, at least for awhile. It has happened about this time of year, for the last two years.
TL;DR:
I'm running into data corruption on a PGP encrypted system and I can't figure out what's causing it. Can anyone help me figure how to prevent it?