yWriter7 keeps overwriting my content

[Mono]

I recently upgraded to yWriter7 from yWriter6. I used yWriter6 for about two years with no issues whatsoever so I was a bit hesitant to upgrade. Overall, I liked the new features and improved UI. I experienced no issues the day I downloaded it.

The issues started yesterday. I opened the software to find that one of my scenes was overwritten with the content from another scene. The overwritten scene was, fortunately, a blank one so I simply deleted the text.

I opened the software today to find that it happened again. A scene was rewritten with another scene's content. I lost about 1,000 words. I was able to recover half of them.

I am obviously very furious about this. It keeps happening every time I close the software.

Some things to note: Only the content part is being overwritten, the other tabs in the scene are unchanged. The scene rewriting also happens when I close and reopen the project without closing the software itself. My other projects seem to be fine, but that's because I haven't edited anything in them since I got yWriter7.

If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know. I'm using this software for NaNo and I cannot afford to lose a single word on this project.

[Simon Haynes]

Hi - First off, yWriter saves the current scene as you're writing it, in time-stamped increments.

Tools - Backups - View Autobackups

From there you can copy/paste the lost content.

Second, make certain you're using the latest yWriter 7 AND a YW7 format project (I do not recommend anyone use YW5)

I've just completed a 104,000 novel using yWriter 7, 90% of it written last month, and experienced no issues. In fact, I've not had one report of the issue you mention, so I'm keen to find out the circumstances leading to the issue (hence asking version number and project format)

Finally, are you loading the project from cloud storage?

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[Peter T.]

Simon, 

how about when you open a project in an outdated format, yWriter suggests converting it to yw7 format? This might save some trouble, because probably many users don't think about this when updating yWriter. However, there could be a "remember my decision and don't ask me again" option.

Cheers, 

Peter

[Simon Haynes]

Yes, I've been thinking of adding a warning message when opening a YW5 project.  I could just force people to import and convert yw5 to yw6 or 7, but I prefer to keep transparent compatibility

I think I've found the bug though - it might have been a file in the RTF5 folder which was NOT a scene RTF file. Perhaps a leftover temp file from opening a scene externally?

You see, yWriter 5/6/7 had this routine which gets a list of the scene files, and then checks all of them for the scene number (_00000.rtf)

This is so there is no chance of overwriting a file.  But if there was a stray file in there which wasn't meant to be there at all, this checking routine could fail because the file has no _00000 in it.

Now I've got a new system: count the number of files in the folder and add 1. Then keep adding 1 while the filename exists. (In case someone has scene files 1, 2, 3, 5 for some unknown reason.)

I've been using the new ebook exporter and I think I've nailed any remaining bugs, so I'll upload a beta soon. But because I'm flat out writing I haven't had time to deal with bug reports/fixes/etc, so I've left YW as it is for the time being.

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[Mono]

Hi Simon! Sorry for the late reply.

I experimented with the bugged scenes a few days ago and learned that this issue only happens with the scenes that I created using the "Create multiple scenes" feature. Any scenes that I created separately were completely fine.

My software is up to date, and I'm loading the projects from my computer, not through cloud storage.

[Noah Herzog]

I got the same bug and lost a ton of time and some progress. 

The issue seems to be that ywriter 7 saves the text into multiple scenes at the same time. When i open the project i have the same text in 4-5 scenes and if i write something in one scene or delete the double text bad things happen. 

Simon, you say to convert to y7 files but there is no option. I looked on your site and it just says "5-7 are all fine, no conversion" and i cant select a y5 file to convert it.

Oh, and it locks the project if i don't stop dropbox sync.

[Simon Haynes]

Hi

Are you using Create Multiple Scenes with a YW5 project? (I will upload a yWriter7 beta now which has a new method of creating new RTF scenes in the YW5 format)

Loading and saving from cloud storage with YW5 projects just isn't supported.(The YW5 format was never designed for cloud storage. It existed before cloud storage was even a thing.)

Converting to YW7 format is trivial: Project - Project Settings - Misc Settings (tab) - select yWriter 7 and click Save.

However, if Dropbox/Google Drive/etc are locking the lock file while syncing, I can't stop that happening unfortunately. The lock file exists to prevent people opening the same project twice, but because there's a delay syncing with the cloud, yWriter can't delete it when the project load is finished. The only thing you might be able to do is tell your Cloud storage NOT to sync files ending in .lock

By the way, the info on the website stating that YW5/6/7 are the same is referring to the program itself, not the project format. YW7 is the most reliable format, in my opinion.

Personally I wouldn't use the YW5 project format under any circumstances. It was designed over 12 years ago, it's slow and inefficient, and it won't work properly on cloud storage drives. It also has issues with international character sets and Unicode, which were fixed in the YW7 format.  I switched everything I have to YW6 2-3 years ago, and now my 50+ projects are all YW7.

Cheers

Simon

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[Simon Haynes]

By the way, I would check Tools - Autobackups - View Autobackups, because yWriter keeps timestamped copies of everything you type, and all your scenes should be in there.

On Tue, 17 Nov 2020 at 11:27, Noah Herzog <xanos...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Simon Haynes]

Can you tell me whether this is a YW5 project?

If so, you might like to try yWriter 7 beta 7.1.1.3, which I just uploaded. It has a different method of creating new RTF filenames for YW5 projects.

Cheers

Simon

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[Noah Herzog]

Thank you for the quick reply. Today, I was a happy writer again. If switching to YW7 did not solve all issues i'll get back in here. 

btw: I was using YW5 since you released it, not sure when i started using dropbox, but besides sometimes getting a "can't save" message which would only mean i'd have to hit the button some seconds later again it worked far beyond your own expectations and never ran into any issues up until some weeks ago when i switched to a new system. 

thank you and many good words to you

[Simon Haynes]

I agree, it still works putting YW5 files on the cloud most of the time (let's say 99.99%) but on the other hand when it fails those folk are guaranteed to email me ;-)

I have no idea how many yWriter users there are, but obviously my target is zero emails about problems with yWriter.

Most of the time, the emails I get reporting lost projects are to do with people trying to restore a backup and partially overwriting the existing files, people trying to open a YW5 project from a zip file (doesn't work), some folk who start editing the sample project and then lose it after a reinstall, disk failures, unexpected Windows reboots, logging in as a different user and the like. In every case I've helped to get the data back. sometimes with Windows remote assistance and controlling their mouse with mine, other times with screenshots and so on.

Right now there are a couple of bugs I need to fix, but after the mammoth 2-3 months earlier this year where I did nothing but yWriter programming, I'm happy it's all running pretty smoothly. I couldn't support yWriter if it was a buggy mess, that's for sure.

And now, back to writing. I'm doing Nanowrimo and I'm about 9k from finishing my latest novel. I've also put together a 6-day series of promos for one of my box sets next week, which took hours to organise.

Not sure whether anyone here uses KDP or Amazon Advertising, but I wrote a tool called SalesScanner which imports the reports and breaks sales down by day/month/etc. I'm working on a feature now which lets me import the advertising reports too, so I can see spend and net per title.

Cheers

Simon

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