When Windows Crashes, Do Your Open Flare Files Scramble?

[beagley]

Windows crashed while I was running Flare. Upon booting up again, I discovered:

1. My Stylesheet completely vanished. The whole file. The Stylesheets folder was just EMPTY.

2. At least one of my open files turned to utter spaghetti. Here's what I see when I open it with a text editor:



LESSON LEARNED:
Backup a lot! I was able to restore my stylesheet. I was NOT able to restore the topic I was working on and will have to recreate several hours of work.

QUESTION:
Is this kind of behavior normal? Honestly, I thought my Flare files were nice, safe text XML files and that Flare just opened them and saved them and that a crash shouldn't have such dire results.

Anyway, happy Monday to everyone,
-D

[Andrew]

That kind of behavior hasn't been normal for me, although I admit Windows has not crashed on me in a long, long time, so I wouldn't really consider a Windows crash to be normal in the first place. It might be normal Flare behavior for Windows crashing.

That said, I have no idea why your stylesheet would disappear, nor why a topic (which you had presumably saved in the past) would end up gobbledy-gook.

If Windows is crashing frequently, I would look into that and try to fix it. Could be the result of faulty drivers, software, or hardware (i.e., *anything*). A properly-running and maintained Windows doesn't crash often, if at all.

[RamonS]

Flare files are nice, safe, plain text, flat ASCII, text files....unless you talk about the half-compiled and yet to be half-interpreted DotNet binaries and DLLs. Either way, when Windows crashes it takes the file system management with it. That can cause file corruptions, file allocation table goof ups, and a whole lot of other nasty stuff for that NTFS is absolutely ill-prepared (keep in mind, NTFS is over 15 years old). But even regardless of the file system used, violent crashes can cause all kinds of harm and hose about every OS in existence.
That said, make a backup of your project NOW! Then investigate why Windows crashed and take applicable measures. Once you have a good idea what happened or may have happened you can conduct some more damage control and attempt fixing the file system if that is still possible (shouldn't have continued as if nothing happened). If it really goofed things up that badly I'd be expecting the next crash to happen any time. And it could well be that the hard drive is on the frizz.
You already made the best conclusion from this: always make plenty of known to be working backups.
Feel free to pass on the system event logs if you do not know what to look at. Half the time I don't know what all that gibberish means either, but once in a while all that blahblah includes some good clues.

[beagley]

I'm running Windows through Parallels, so I do anticipate having to deal with the occasional crash... though it doesn't happen more than once every couple weeks.

I guess I don't yet have the inclination to try and track down the cause of the crashes... and least not yet. Troubleshooting operating systems is like swabbing cuts with a Tobasco poultice.

I was just so surprised by the way the file was corrupted. Utterly bizarre. And the vanishing stylesheet thing was amazing.

I wonder if Flare's text editor does some kind of scratch-space buffer operation, creating a temp file somewhere for the actual work, and so the original file (while being edited) is munged somehow. I also use Vim sometimes... maybe that's the problem.

Ah well. I'll be creating incremental backups to a remote server twice a day, from here on out.
-d

[KevinDAmery]

Flare 4.2 does have an auto-save feature, so if it was writing the autosave when the crash happened, well, all bets are off.

You can turn this option off, though. That should help minimize the possibility that random windows crashes will also hose files.

[RamonS]

I think turning the option off will marginally reduce the chances. If there is really a bad crash that affects the file system then it doesn't matter what is running. I'd regularly backup the project files and the entire VM as well.

[beagley]

I hit ctrl-shift-S reflexively every few minutes, anyway. I have now turned autosave to 60 minutes (the default is 10).

I will happily remove any little possible hiccup that isn't giving me a feature I need.