All Tasker profiles/tasks/scenes disappear after reboot

[Phobe Laxu]

This has now happened 3 times this year. With a few months inbetween each occasion: I reboot my tablet and everything is gone in Tasker. Thank the universe I backup every day otherwise I would have been genuinely depressed for weeks. Tasker is a huge part of my life!

So anyway what could be the cause of this problem? What is it that happens at boot (or shutdown?) that would make Tasker go wonky like this?

[dev deque]

I've been having the same problem if I simply close Tasker. Where you see Tasks, Scenes, Vars on the second main menu of Tasker. It will only appear after making a change, but you should see a little check mark in the upper right corner of these menus. Make sure to click that before you exit Tasker or reboot. 

[Thom Little]

Be sure to tap the checkmark after making any change for the change to be applied across all portions of Tasker.

... Thom

[Pent]

I've been having the same problem if I simply close Tasker. Where you see Tasks, Scenes, Vars on the second main menu of Tasker. It will only appear after making a change, but you should see a little check mark in the upper right corner of these menus. Make sure to click that before you exit Tasker or reboot. 

You don't need to use the check mark before exiting Tasker. However, if you reboot after making changes, while
still in the Tasker UI, your changes will be lost. At that point it would make sense to use the checkmark.

Pent

[Thom Little]

You are right of course.

I always hit the check mark after making a change.  I have had problems testing when there were multiple Tasker elements and not all of them knew about the change.  I have had devices crash when there was a change made and on coming back up the changes were gone.

My suggestion is to always hit the check mark unless there is a specific test that you don't want to do it.  No rules to remember or forget when you are tired.

Tasker is simply great.  Spending hours on an apparent bug that was just a coordination issue isn't fun.

... Thom

[Phobe Laxu]

It's not when making changes. I reboot my tablet daily because it gets sluggish quickly (it's a wall mounted tablet so it's always on, showing different Tasker scenes etc). And once in a blue moon Tasker just "empties" (which is easily noticable to me since I have a tasker scene that pops up on boot, so when that particular scene doesn't show up, I know that Tasker is empty again).

When making changes I always use the "exit" menu button and press "save" when the save confirmation pops up.

And it's not just any changes that disappear (tho that has happened 2 times this year), all scenes, tasks, vars and profiles disappear.

Surely I can't be doing something wrong?

[Pent]

If the vars are disappearing, it's not simply a problem with loading your configuration
data. The vars are stored separately. So there's probably something funny going
on with your system, I can't imagine any bug in Tasker that would cause the vars
to be wiped, only via the user action Variable Clear.

Pent

[Phobe Laxu]

Thanks, next time it happens I will double check if the vars are really wiped.

[Sean Williams]

I can confirm this problem with lost user data - however for me it has occurred only recently while on v5u5.

Variable values are indeed kept intact with the rest of the data the profiles, tasks and scenes lost.

Restoring from the auto backup does the job and as the variables are not lost there is no major trauma.

Last time it occurred I captured a couple of popups from tasker one complaining about running out of memory and to delete something to make more space.

[Phobe Laxu]

>>Last time it occurred I captured a couple of popups from tasker one complaining about running out of memory and to delete something to make more space.

interesting, I never had one of those. Was it an Android native popup or spawned from Tasker itself?

[Sean Williams]

interesting, I never had one of those. Was it an Android native popup or spawned from Tasker itself?

Spawned from Tasker. Maybe because "Popup Errors/Warnings" is enabled.

In any case it appeared to be a warning about storage space of which there were plenty. I'm unsure of the legitimacy.

Maybe Pent can clarify further.

[Sean Williams]

Maybe Pent can clarify further.

 Screenshots.

[Pent]

Sean, what happens exactly ?

You load up the UI and there's just no data ?  Or there's a crash, and after that there's
no data ? Or ?

Pent

[Sean Williams]

Sean, what happens exactly ?

You load up the UI and there's just no data ? Or there's a crash, and after that there's
no data ? Or ?

Hi Pent,

Its not entirely clear to me how/when/if it crashed.

I load Tasker you see a blank screen for longer than expected, the UI appears with only the home icon in the project bar then the popups appear just like the screenshots.

[Pent]

OK, I'm seeing quite a few related crashes in the developer console as well since a few versions, so there's some
bug been introduced somewhere. Good to have a human to talk to, I'm at a dead-end with just the crash logs.

Could you please turn on logging:

http://tasker.dinglisch.net/userguide/en/faqs/faq-how.html#x2

And send me Tasker/log/tasker.txt and Tasker/log/tasker.txt.1 (if existing)
when it happens again ?

Thanks,

Pent

[Sean Williams]

Could you please turn on logging:

http://tasker.dinglisch.net/userguide/en/faqs/faq-how.html#x2

And send me Tasker/log/tasker.txt and Tasker/log/tasker.txt.1 (if existing)
when it happens again ?

Sure, I'll try and catch it and get back to you.

[Pent]

BTW, what size are your backups, if you do Menu / Data / Backup / User for instance ?
I suspect they're very large ? If you clone a couple of large tasks, does it trigger a
crash next load ?

Pent

[Sean Williams]

BTW, what size are your backups, if you do Menu / Data / Backup / User for instance ?
I suspect they're very large ? If you clone a couple of large tasks, does it trigger a
crash next load ?

User backups are around 6mb.

I actually got lucky earlier and have a log for you. Will email it over.

When I get a minute I'll try clone a couple of tasks and get back to you on that.

[Sean Williams]

If you clone a couple of large tasks, does it trigger a
crash next load ?

I couldn't reproduce anything by cloning tasks.

I've sent the log via email, it appears that a task was running in the background at the same time I was switching between a couple of scenes.

After this I entered Tasker and the data was wiped.

[Pent]

Thanks very much for the log Sean.

All the projects are loaded, then a short time later in the code
all have disappeared. There are no exceptions or errors to be found.

I've built a version with a lot more logging in that code stretch, if you can send me
another log, hopefully I can narrow down at which point things are going wrong...

http://tasker.dinglisch.net/prerelease/Tasker.5.0u6m.apk

Thanks,

Pent

[Sean Williams]

I've built a version with a lot more logging in that code stretch, if you can send me
another log, hopefully I can narrow down at which point things are going wrong...

Hi,

Sent you over a couple more logs.

[Pent]

Thanks again.

The one with crash, I couldn't see any problem, possibly that part of
the log got pushed out by the restart logging.

The other one was an OOM, and looked just like the log from yesterday,
so I'm going to assume that's the cause of all three
(also most likely: large data file and recent scene editor usage).

I will ponder what to do about this. Obviously a restart of some kind instead
of allowing the user to save the wiped data is the minimum.

Pent

[Pent]

Sorry, OOM = Out Of Memory

Pent

[Pent]

Best solution I can come up with for now (I don't want to make
major untested changes) is to restart the whole Tasker process
when the app is OOM during loading of data.

The UI is restarted automatically, so the user only sees a blip.

The unfortunate side-effect is that the monitor service is restarted
and any running tasks will be lost.

But since we don't know if it's a leak in the monitor/exe service or
e.g. scene editor causing all the memory to be used up, I don't
see any other option at this time, and it at least stops people
losing all their data.

Pent

[Sean Williams]

Best solution I can come up with for now (I don't want to make
major untested changes) is to restart the whole Tasker process
when the app is OOM during loading of data.

The UI is restarted automatically, so the user only sees a blip.

The unfortunate side-effect is that the monitor service is restarted
and any running tasks will be lost.

Ok. Makes sense and certainly preferred over lost data.

Thanks

[Phobe Laxu]

i am using version 4.8u5m on Android 4.2.2

For the last week Tasker has been cleared at least 4 times at reboot (it only seems to do it when rebooted). I noticed that the vars weren't cleared.

1. I checked the vars list, I noticed that there were about 1000 variables that are no longer used, yet they were still in the variables list, non-empty. I have now removed all of those. These were all in the Home tab even tho the pertaining project was in another tab.

2. As a precaution i am now backing up the tasker data.

A. First by writing a description file: it is taking a long time. When clicking "write file" tasker freezes with the "write file" menu option selected. It took 3 minutes to write desc file.

B. now backing up with user backup xml. took 15 seconds. 

3. Checked Play Store; no Tasker updates available for me. 

I could without that many tears, replace my Tablet. Would that be more advisable according to you Pent, instead of trying to troubleshoot this myself or bothering you with end-of-life support queries as it were?

thanks!

[Phobe Laxu]

... the very next reboot after doing all of this, Tasker cleared again.

[Phobe Laxu]

You know what, as this Tablet seemingly cannot be updated beyond Jelly Bean, i  have just ordered a Nougat tablet.