Sorry, John, but I have no idea what you are writing about. A database is anything that stores data.

There was nothing wrong with the "Recent Transcripts", or getting access to them, until you removed them a few days ago from where Brian had placed them nearly two years ago.
If they are corrupted, it happened during your removal of them.
How can you "check that every transcript is linked from the main alpha index" if you no longer have these hundreds of transcripts from the corrupted file, in order to check them?

Sue