How to recover a corrupt SQLite3 database?

Question

This is a follow up question to a previously answered post: Is there a command line utility for validating SQLite databases in Linux?

If a database is producing the following error:

$ sqlite3 mydata.db "PRAGMA integrity_check" Error: database disk image is malformed 

Is there any cleanup processing that can be done to recover the database to a usable state? Even at the potential loss of some corrupt records?

Thanks

Answer 1

UPDATE: There is now an automatic method that is built into SQLite: .recover

Sometimes, the corruption is only or mostly in indexes, in which case it would be possible to get some or most records by trying to dump the entire database with .dump, and use those commands to create a new database:

$ sqlite3 mydata.db ".dump" | sqlite3 new.db 

However, this is not always possible.

The easiest and most reliable way is to restore the database file from the backup.