[moneydance] data file corruption

[Gordon Alley]

I just checked my MD data folder, and I do have 5 backup files plus
the current file (which is apparently the same file as the last backup
file). There is one oddity, though.

The backups are dated April 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, so I'm thinking, what
happened to April 21, a date I KNOW I updated my records? Then I
realized that I probably had MD open past midnight that night, and
then I used it again BEFORE midnight on April 22 (based upon the file
modification time). So the April 21 changes ended up getting backed up
on April 22, so there was no separate April 21 backup.

Something else I didn't think about until after my original post. We
were having heavy lightning storms here in San Antonio last night, and
there were a number of power glitches during the evening, but never
enough to reset my Computer or my TV. Maybe one of those hit during an
auto-save and caused the file corrutpion.

-Gordon

On 4/25/07, Brett Russ <bruss at alum.wpi.edu> wrote:
> On 4/25/07, Gordon Alley <gordon at gordonalley.com> wrote:
> > I just wanted to relate this incident to the list in case it's not just me.
> <snip>
> > When I tried to open my MD file, MD asked me if I'd like to open the
> > more-recent backup file, and I told it to do so. But, to my chagrin,
> > after a short delay I was presented with an alert that said "Error:
> > Cannot read file: java.io.EOFException". Also, when I look at the
> > files, the backup is about half the size of yesterday's file. Doesn't
> > look good!
>
> I had pretty much the exact same thing happen yesterday.  I am not
> sure what 2007 build I was running, but it was fairly recent.  My
> Linux machine froze and I needed to hard power cycle it (!!) to get it
> back.  When I launched MD it prompted me to a) upgrade to 566; and b)
> use the autosave file.  I said yes to both.  The autosave file gave
> the same exception you noted and had 0 size.  The main file was dated
> 2007-04-21, or 3 days old.  Therefore I lost 3 days of manually
> entered transactions which I swore I had manually saved at least once
> a day.
>
> No problem I thought, I have MD set to do daily backups.  I checked my
> backup directory and saw the most recent backup was also 3 days old!
> And there were only 5 backups in that directory despite me specifying
> to keep unlimited backup files.
>
> So...couple problems here:
> 1) autosave file empty or at least corrupted
> 2) daily backups don't happen (this is big)
> 3) daily backups are pruned when they shouldn't be
>
> Can someone on the development team describe at a high level how the
> autosave and backup code works?  How could backups have malfunctioned
> for 3 days?  How could autosave write garbage?  Could there be more
> checking of sane autosave and backup files in the code?
>
> Thanks,
> BR

-- 
Gordon B. Alley
http://www.gordonalley.com