I am sorry you have problems like mine, but it makes me feel a little better.  All of my saves were manual and my reopened file still reverted back to an incomplete previous version.  

Good luck.

+x

 

Don DeLong - 12/16/2019 5:53:40 PM

We've seen similar issues sporadically over the last month or so.  We save all customer related data on a shared drive that is backed up daily, and we've had several cases where we've lost files.  It has been different behavior in each case, so I can't be sure it is specific to Stardraw. 

In the most recent occurrence (last week), I saved my work manually before I left for lunch around noon.  I returned from lunch and continued working.  I manually saved again when I left for the day around 6:30PM.  When I opened the project the next day, the file was back at the point where I had saved before lunch, but the file indicated it was saved at 6:30PM. 

In another instance one of our designers saved a file when he was almost done with a system on a Friday night, and Monday the file size was 1kB and un-openable.  This required restoration from backup from the previous day, which cost him 12 hours or so work. 

There doesn't seem to be a pattern so far, but as a precaution I've started manually saving periodically with a new revision name just in case the data gets corrupted/lost somehow.

Hi Don,

I'm sorry to hear about these occurrences and we would very much like to get to the bottom of them.  Usually we rely on reproducing any issue to understand and fix it, but we have never seem such occurrences in house, nor have we ever been able to reliably reproduce such a thing with other customers.  This is very frustrating, both for us and for you, and it is a cause of great concern for us that users' confidence in the Save function might be anything less than 100%.

We have designed Saving to be extremely robust and it may help if you understand our implementation of Save. 

When Save is called, a process begins locally which serializes and compresses all the data, drawings etc in your project; this process ensures an optimal filesize and this first step all happens on the local computer and creates the new project file in a temporary folder..

When serialization and creation of the temporary file is verified complete and without failure we rename the original project file on disk with a .bak extension.  When this is complete we move (rename) the new project file from the local temporary folder to give it the filename and location on disk of the original project file.  When this move is complete and confirmed (by Windows) then and only then do we remove the .bak file.

In this way we can be confident that when a Save happens, no data is removed until we receive confirmation that every step in the process of generation and replacement has completed without error.

While this is, I hope, useful information, it doesn't help us understand how what you describe could have happened. 

One theory is, then, that something over and above what you have described may have happened.  Technically it is possible for more than one user to open the same project file.  You say the project is in a shared drive so if more than one user has the file open, the last save action will save the file, overwriting any previous saves (from any user).  Is it possible that you (User A) opened the file in the morning, then someone else (User B) opened the file around lunchtime, but did little work on that file, then you saved near the end of the day, but User B saved their version at 6:30?  This would overwrite your work and create the timestamp you mentioned.

Also, out of interest, how long was Stardraw Design 7.3 running?  e.g. do you start the application in the morning and keep it running through the day, closing in the evening, or do you leave it running for many days at a time?  If this last scenario, what does your computer do when unattended for long periods:  sleep, hibernate, shut down, or something else?

Please be assured that we will give our best efforts to understand and resolve any issues relating to the Save process, if it's found in any way lacking. 

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

+x

 

Rob Robinson - 12/17/2019 5:39:02 PM

+x

 

Don DeLong - 12/16/2019 5:53:40 PM

We've seen similar issues sporadically over the last month or so.  We save all customer related data on a shared drive that is backed up daily, and we've had several cases where we've lost files.  It has been different behavior in each case, so I can't be sure it is specific to Stardraw. 

In the most recent occurrence (last week), I saved my work manually before I left for lunch around noon.  I returned from lunch and continued working.  I manually saved again when I left for the day around 6:30PM.  When I opened the project the next day, the file was back at the point where I had saved before lunch, but the file indicated it was saved at 6:30PM. 

In another instance one of our designers saved a file when he was almost done with a system on a Friday night, and Monday the file size was 1kB and un-openable.  This required restoration from backup from the previous day, which cost him 12 hours or so work. 

There doesn't seem to be a pattern so far, but as a precaution I've started manually saving periodically with a new revision name just in case the data gets corrupted/lost somehow.

Hi Don,

I'm sorry to hear about these occurrences and we would very much like to get to the bottom of them.  Usually we rely on reproducing any issue to understand and fix it, but we have never seem such occurrences in house, nor have we ever been able to reliably reproduce such a thing with other customers.  This is very frustrating, both for us and for you, and it is a cause of great concern for us that users' confidence in the Save function might be anything less than 100%.

We have designed Saving to be extremely robust and it may help if you understand our implementation of Save. 

When Save is called, a process begins locally which serializes and compresses all the data, drawings etc in your project; this process ensures an optimal filesize and this first step all happens on the local computer and creates the new project file in a temporary folder..

When serialization and creation of the temporary file is verified complete and without failure we rename the original project file on disk with a .bak extension.  When this is complete we move (rename) the new project file from the local temporary folder to give it the filename and location on disk of the original project file.  When this move is complete and confirmed (by Windows) then and only then do we remove the .bak file.

In this way we can be confident that when a Save happens, no data is removed until we receive confirmation that every step in the process of generation and replacement has completed without error.

While this is, I hope, useful information, it doesn't help us understand how what you describe could have happened. 

One theory is, then, that something over and above what you have described may have happened.  Technically it is possible for more than one user to open the same project file.  You say the project is in a shared drive so if more than one user has the file open, the last save action will save the file, overwriting any previous saves (from any user).  Is it possible that you (User A) opened the file in the morning, then someone else (User B) opened the file around lunchtime, but did little work on that file, then you saved near the end of the day, but User B saved their version at 6:30?  This would overwrite your work and create the timestamp you mentioned.

Also, out of interest, how long was Stardraw Design 7.3 running?  e.g. do you start the application in the morning and keep it running through the day, closing in the evening, or do you leave it running for many days at a time?  If this last scenario, what does your computer do when unattended for long periods:  sleep, hibernate, shut down, or something else?

Please be assured that we will give our best efforts to understand and resolve any issues relating to the Save process, if it's found in any way lacking. 

Rob,
Thanks for your reply.  That is useful information to know while trying to root out this problem.  Fortunately it has only occurred a couple times, but that makes it very hard to diagnose. 

A bit of additional information:

The day that the file contents appeared rolled back to my lunchtime save, I did indeed have SD7.3 running all day, but got pulled away to a couple meetings that interrupted my actual use.  My desktop is set to never sleep/hibernate and never shuts down.  It is actually remote headed (KVM extenders to my office) from our data center as it is so noisy.  The whole rack is on dual redundant UPS power supplies along with our servers, so no power failure or anything like that.  I am reasonably sure that no one else had the file open as I'm the only one working on the project involved, and our other SD users were working on other jobs at the time. 

I'm wondering how the software would behave if something like our security software blocked access to the server when I saved at 630PM?  I'm assuming from your detailed description of the save process there would be some kind of warning or error when it failed to save?  Not sure how that would explain the file modified time changing though. 

I'll keep you posted if we see any recurrences of the problem, but in the meantime I'm using it as an example to drive better data management practices among our staff.  The old adage "If you don't have it in 3 places, you don't have it" applies. 

Thanks again,
Don

Thanks for the information Don.

Just to verify, it's straight KVM and you're not running under RDP or another sort of remoting or terminal service?


Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

+x

 

Rob Robinson - 12/17/2019 6:14:36 PM

Thanks for the information Don.

Just to verify, it's straight KVM and you're not running under RDP or another sort of remoting or terminal service?

Correct, a Startech USB2.0 extender and two Extron HDMI extenders