"database extraction failed"

[Mikael Bowellan]

Nice. In the middle of writing yWriter shut down (crashed) with any messages except brief "database extraction failed".

I rebooted my PC and started yWriter again. I only get blank screen, no chapters, nothing. Did I just lose the whole manuscript I have been writing two years? 

I tried to open a recent... no dice.

Let's jus say that I not happy right now....

[Mikael Bowellan]

Okay... did a bit of digging. Found "Autobackups" directory and the full backup that has been created today.

I extracted the ***.yw7 file from it and replaced same named zero length file with it. Now after opening the "recent", I got everything back. It was missing the few latest edits I was doing when it crashed, that seem to be the damage.

This was the first time ever that yWriter did something like this... slightly worrying, but life goes on.

[Simon Haynes]

A loading error like that is generally caused by Windows shutting down when yWriter is saving out your work.

There are several ways to recover though, nothing is lost.

First, there's a .bak file in the same folder as your project.  Rename your project file to something else, then duplicate this backup file, change the entension to match whatever you were using (yw5/yw6/yw7) and double-click the new file.

Second, in the Autobackups folder for your project you'll find daily zips taken at 15 minute intervals, as well as copies of scenes saved about every five minutes as you were typing them, going right back to the start of your project.

Find the most recent zip, extract it into an empty folder, and you should be able to continue from there.

For the future, I highly recommend going into Tools - Backups - Configure Alternate Autobackups folder and set it to somewhere on cloud storage. That way you won't lose anything even if your hard drive fails and you never take manual backups.

Cheers

Simon

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[Simon Haynes]

The latest edits you were doing should be in Tools - Backups - View Autobackups

It saves your scenes here as you're working on them. The default (I think) is every 5 minutes, but I have mine set to every 60 seconds.

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[Simon Haynes]

Just want to point out that this sort of error is extremely rare, but writing on a laptop or PC which Windows suddenly decides to reboot for updates/power saving/etc is the most likely cause.

The program does duplicate your project file before writing out the new one though, so the BAK file is the first place to look next time.

You can also take a look at Tools - Debug - View Log File to see if there's anything else in there, like a write error (hardware fail?) or similar.

If there's a genuine bug when saving I'd like to see the log file, because to my knowledge the program is bulletproof in that area.

On Sun, 11 Jun 2023 at 20:37, Mikael Bowellan <mikael....@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Mikael Bowellan]

.Bak file was also zero length. And the windows wasn't shutting down or updating. everything else continued working like they were... I rebooted myself to see if that would fix the issue.

I have no idea what really happened, but it did happen while I was typing the words. 

In the log the nothing I can see related to write failure.

But thanks to the autobackup, I didn't lose much work.

[Mikael Bowellan]

And I have yWriter and all its files on a directory that's inside a Dropbox-folder. So everything is being backupped to the cloud automatically. I don't trust hard drives, lost too many years and years ago  :)

[Simon Haynes]

That's a really strange one.

Which version of yWriter do you have? The main release of yWriter7 hasn't changed for about 2 years now, but the beta undergoes regular updates.

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[Mikael Bowellan]

7.1.2.4

[Simon Haynes]

Ah, that could be the issue. Any syncing issues and you can lose your project (e.g. if it's still uploading to dropbox and trying to save a new copy over the current one at the same time.)

Even now, if the program crashes for any reason and the project path contains 'dropbox', the program will pop up a warning saying it's not recommended to run your project off cloud storage. The number of emails I used to get about this was incredible, completely overwhelming, although as network speeds have increased the emails about that particular issue have dried up.

It was a big problem when everyone was using the YW5 format, which was never designed for cloud storage.

In fact, dropbox and cloud storage are the reason I ditched the YW5 project format in favour of all-in-one YW6 and YW7. Cloud storage can't keep up with syncing 200+ scene files only to have them all saved again moments later. (It only saves out changed scene files, but if you did a global search replace, that would do it.)

I recommend storing the project on a local drive but set up the alternate backup folder I mentioned, pointing that to dropbox instead.

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[Mikael Bowellan]

That is probably the reason... When I move delete and handle loads of files I usually pause DropBox. I think will do just that in the future, when I'm writing I will just pause DropBox so that it doesn't mess up anything.

And my files are of course on a local drive, but the folder in that drive (basically whole 3TB drive) is also backed up to the cloud. I never use the cloud files so to speak, always local files. But backing up those files on the fly, in the background, can cause the problem I had.

[Peter T.]

On Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at 7:56:39 AM UTC+2 Mikael Bowellan wrote:

And my files are of course on a local drive, but the folder in that drive (basically whole 3TB drive) is also backed up to the cloud. I never use the cloud files so to speak, always local files. But backing up those files on the fly, in the background, can cause the problem I had.

That's why I use a batchfile calling robocopy to manually push/pull my working directories to/from the dropbox sync folder. 

In parallel, I've got a backup software for hourly incremental backups on a NAS.

[Simon Haynes]

Same, and Robocopy is amazing. I have my own ycopy2 software as well.

Aside from my NAS devices, over the past couple of years I've also repurposed 5 old PCs, filling them with my old 250/500/1tb drives in RAID to use as extra backup devices.

As a programmer & author I can be a bit extreme about my backups, but the idea of recreating 30 years of work from scratch doesn't really appeal to me...

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[Mikael Bowellan]

To me the whole idea using DropBox is that it's automatic - I don't have to do any manual work to backup stuff. It does for me and I don't have to think about it at all. There are rare cases that causes problems, like this and using Unity. Any batch-file and manual work has a possibility of losing data if the HD crashes between those manual back-ups (batch-files or even automated hourly backups).