Recover not working

[mgj32]

Hi,
Recover, which has saved me on numerous occasions, suddenly stopped working about three weeks ago. As I am about to start working on something entirely new, I'd like to get it going again, but haven't figured out how.

The only possible contributing factors I can think of are:
1. Some time ago I got a format not recognized when I tried to re-open a file I had just closed. I re-started the computer, thinking that might help. When I opened Composer again, the mididev.cfg was 13kb, instead of the 80kb it had been. I deleted the new 13 kb one and copied the the one I had backed up the night before to the Composer directory. All worked as it should, except that the one file still would not open.

2. The recovery directory was getting huge, so every couple of weeks I have been deleting files no longer needed, but I've been doing this for months.

However, Recover was working as it is supposed to after these things happened, and I know of no incident in the last week of November when files I was working on stopped being added to the Recover directory. I have tried resetting the options, to 3/2 instead of 2/2. But nothing gets added to the Recover directory. I have also imported a mididev.cfg file from last April, when Recover was working, but that made no difference.

I haven't tried re-installing Composer over the current installation, then importing the last backed up mididev.cfg file. But I wonder if that is what I should try next. Or perhaps there is something a bit easier to have a go at?

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

all best,
mgj

[Sherry C]

Howdy MG,

Autosave works in the background when saving your files, so that it doesn't interrupt your workflow. However, there are conditions that will disrupt it from working properly (we do have it on the list to make this more robust, though this is the first report I've had of it not working properly).


If you're working on really large files, and have the save interval set too low, it can't completely save a backup before the next gets called for (this is the main issue we're looking at fixing, but it affects the following conditions as well.)
running other applications at the same time (ie so there's not as much "background" time for it to run)
short backup intervals (2-3 minutes, just because that doesn't give it the background time it needs)
older or slower machines (especially if combined with the above conditions)

You can try changing the settings in File/Autosave options to something less demanding, like backup every 5 or 10 minutes, and make sure that you don't have other unnecessary programs running in the background. Also make sure you don't have something like background virus scanning going on at the same time. In those cases, Composer won't have any "background" time to run an autosave :)

ttfn,
Sherry

[mgj32]

Hi Sherry,
You don't give yourself enough credit. Recover, set 2/2, has worked without a hitch on files of up to over 3.5MB, and saved me a lot of re-construction on several occasions. (Maybe there is some benefit to having 4GB of memory.) I never have any other program running, other than Thunderbird when I am using Composer. I do run a thorough virus/malware/anti root kit scan every day, but that's while I'm sleeping.

I don't know what caused Composer to give me the message that a file I had just been working on and closed was in an unrecognized format and advised upgrading to the latest version, when I tried to re-open it a few moments later. (BTW, this file did not show up in Recover.) Probably something got corrupted in the file. It's said that rebooting can solve a lot of problems, but in this case gave me the 13KB mididev.cfg, which may be the strangest thing of all, almost as if the simple reboot reinstalled that single file.

Instead of deleting that new mididev.cfg and copying the mididev.cfg I had backed up the day before (I back up the whole Notation directory and all sub-directories daily), I probably should have set the Recover options, made it mididev.bac and only then copied the file from the day before.

I don't know what will happen if I re-install--that is, whether the fresh installation will accept the current mididev.cfg, or not. But I really want to avoid re-typing what is on the sound card. So until I get a few just in case hours, I'll just manually save every few minutes, maybe to a "work" directory with a slightly different title each time, so I will be able to see the time of each save.

This may be one of those things that can happen that can never be explained. I heard confirmed, what I had been told before, on a Science Channel program on cosmic rays--that they affect computers every day.

all best,
mgj