[moneydance] data file corruption

[Edward Reid]

At 10:31 04/25/07 -0700, Edward A. Melia, C.P.A./Attorney wrote:
>I have auto save set for every two minutes and backup set to make
>daily backups, retaining the last 50.  The backups are all in the
>proper location.  I'm running Win XP Pro.

So it appears that in MD, infinity=5. According to Edward (no relation), 50 
works. I'm on WinXP, MD build 565, backups set to infinity, and I find that 
only 5 have been saved. (I have at least one "real" backup of many older 
ones.) So this problem is being reported on Mac OS X, WinXP, and Linux. I 
think it's an MD problem. We've also had a report that "50" works 
correctly, so it appears to be a problem only for the "infinity" setting. 
(Needless to say, I've just changed my setting to 50.)

I have just created three entries on the MD trac. I encourage others to add 
their comments, since this problem appears to be widespread.

1093: this problem, "infinity=5".

1094: on WinXP (at least), a shut down or restart does not trigger the MD 
"save on every quit"

1095: having a transaction open (unrecorded) inhibits backups. Read the 
trac entry for details. I discovered this in checking my backups in 
response to this thread.

It's possible that issues 1094 and 1095 might be part of the problems that 
some others reported. In particular, 1095 might be the cause of Gordon's 
missing backup.

Just to weigh in on the other issues in the thread ...

I have also seen the "partially saved file" corruption. I reported this in 
ticket #753, last September. Sean said he would put in a fix. Since I have 
no way to test it, I cannot verify that he did. However, it's clear that a 
crash in the middle of saving a file will result in corruption -- that's 
true of any program not using database techniques. So the fix needs to keep 
the old autosave until the new one completes successfully. Based on the 
report, I'm not confident that this is happening.

Regarding David Carlson's slow-down -- this should be a separate thread.

As far as free disk space, the 10% rule was promulgated in the days of much 
smaller disks. 6.5GB on a 60GB disk is a lot of space unless you are 
working with GB-sized files, or trying to defrag the disk.

Edward
-- 
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org