I Just Need to Vent...

[kenneth2k1]

Last night, I was bee-boping around, creating my solution in FM Dev 5.5. All of the sudden I got an illegal operation, so I restarted. When I tried to open my solution again, it said that it could not be opened, and to run the Recover feature. I did so, and it said that all 1500K of info had been recovered. I went to open it, and still got an illegal operation (filemaker.exe was causing an invalid page fault, by the way).

Then I tried to open it on my Win2k machine and still no joy. It says "filemaker pro.e.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program."

So I check out the knowledge base on the FM website, and there is no help there. I call FM, and they tell me to create a completely new file, re-create ALL my fields and import the data. But luckily this was not a running db, I was just developing.

Ultimately, I had to go back to an earlier file which was a couple of days old. So basically I lost about 30 hours of good work.

SO PLEASE, HEED THIS WARNING. BACK UP YOUR FILES JUST IN CASE YOUR COMPUTER FARTS!

Ken

[Mike D.]

I can feel your pain. I learned the hard way to actually create a copy of what I'm developing into a new folder and date that version before I work on it again. That way if something really goes screwy (either the computer or me), I can revert back.

[The Bridge]

I, too, know the heartbreak of work loss. Now I name my "work" folders like so:

projectname yyyy mm dd vv bb

projectname - self-explanatory

yyyy mm dd - current date

vv - project version #

bb - the current date's build #

Before I start working, I rename the work folder with the current date, drop the folder onto DropStuff, and then put the archived file into a Backup folder. If I start and stop work on a project more than once in a given day, I increment the build # before archiving.

I got this folder naming standard, by the way, from CoreSolutions excellent FileMaker Pro Development Standards document which is freely available from their web site. I highly recommend this document to all new developers and developers without standards in place; by implementing it, I have greatly reduced my development time.

[kenneth2k1]

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

My frustration stems from the fact that I had the problem at all. I wasn't doing anything special: just adding fields to a layout! The FM tech support guy suggested that it might have been another application that caused the problem. When I told him that I don't run anything in the background (except Explorer and Systray), and no other programs were opened, he recanted and then said there might have been an error on one of the layouts. I pride myself on running my OSs error-free (sorry bout tuting my own horn), so this is just amazing to me.

Perhaps it was just a one-in-a-million mishap.

Ken

[SteveB]

Ken, it's not one in a million, it's a lot greater. I can clobber a file at will and it will be totally mashed and unrecoverable.

If FM is writing to the disk (even if your only adding a few fields) and Windows locks up, you'll stand a much greater than zero chance of blowing it. I've also had FM do some really strange things when nothing else was happening...things that I've never seen another piece of software do.

[agraham999]

I work on PCs and Macs...and I am not interested in an OS debate...but I will say that I did a marathon job where I worked two hard core weeks in OS X running FMP, Entourage, Word, AIM, Excel, iTunes, etc...and I never had the system crash once. In fact, in a year of X, I've had only one kernel panic and that's it. I hear XP doesn't crash often either...I have it but haven't used it yet. I've been lucky so far...I keep archived copies regularly...and not the same copies in case one may have become corrupt. But I hear your pain...it has happened to me a few times in the past.

[kenneth2k1]

Problem is, I don't think this was an OS malfunction at all. And similarly, I haven't noticed a single problem with Win2k SP2. But I'm sure that for our respective relatively good luck, there are also horror stories out there.

My favorite OS for a long time used to be MacOS 8.7 (probably the most reliable of its time). I couldn't stand Win95. I started developing on MacOS 9.1, and found it very problematic. 9.2 a little better.

The fact is that in my niche (and most, for that matter) run Windows. So I moved over and haven't looked back. Its unfortunate, though, because the Unix backbone of OS10 makes it quite possibly the best OS out there today.

In a perfect world, we would all have Macs. But as a former Mac Monkey maybe that was my problem: a bit too utopic

Nonetheless, I think our points are well made: cant beat a good backup habit!

Ken

[falkaholic]

OS 8.7?? hehe. I bet you mean 8.6!

[falkaholic]

I don't get build numbers.

In FM there is no compiling (a la programming) so therefore no builds. Version number should suit anybody.

Oh course, thats my opinion, i could be wrong.

[The Bridge]

Perhaps "build" is a misleading term -- my mistake. Essentially, I archive a given database before I open it, every single time. As I often switch between projects in the course of a day, I need a way to keep track of that particular day's "builds". The version number applies to the overall version of the solution I'm developing.

Here's what an example Backup folder of mine might look like:

Ultimate DB 2002 08 12 v1.0 b1.sit

Ultimate DB 2002 08 12 v1.0 b2.sit

Ultimate DB 2002 08 13 v1.0 b1.sit

Ultimate DB 2002 08 13 v1.0 b2.sit

Ultimate DB 2002 08 13 v1.0 b3.sit

i.e. I worked on my Ultimate Database