new .yw7 file 'retry' appeared in the project folder?

[KM]

My project works fine when I open it with the usual execution file "myprojectnamehere.yw7" - but I see a new .yw7 file has appeared, being  "myprojectnamehere.yw7_retry.yw7", dated approximately 10 minutes before I closed yWRiter for the night yesterday.

I guess this 'retry' file can be safely deleted as a relic of some process that failed briefly but subsequently recovered itself?

[Simon Haynes]

Are you saving to cloud storage?  Sometimes, temporary files persist as they're uploaded, downloaded, re-synced, etc in the background.  On local storage they should just vanish pretty much instantly.

On Wed, 4 Feb 2026 at 05:39, KM <ceta...@gmail.com> wrote:

My project works fine when I open it with the usual execution file "myprojectnamehere.yw7" - but I see a new .yw7 file has appeared, being  "myprojectnamehere.yw7_retry.yw7", dated approximately 10 minutes before I closed yWRiter for the night yesterday.

I guess this 'retry' file can be safely deleted as a relic of some process that failed briefly but subsequently recovered itself?

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[KM Lafferty]

Hi Simon,

Firstly, note I do use yWriter 7.1.3.1 which I know is a few years old. 

I have looked into various potential offenders that might have created this 'retry.yw7' file out of curiosity.

1) I do not have any form of sync on my computer (I am limited to 30GB a month so don't have data to spare). This is my only computer and it does not even interface with my phone. 

2) I do use an online backup service - iDrive Backup (not their Cloud Drive which is separate though don't ask me what the distinction is). iDrive logs say it backed up on the evening of the 3rd Feb at 7:36pm for 1 minute with success, and again at 8:40pm for 3 minutes with success (it is set to back up yWriter projects on the 36 minute point of every hour).   The timestamp on the puzzling retry.yw7 file was 8:10pm 3rd Feb 2026 - so I don't think it was caused by an action of iDrive.

3) I also use Cobian Reflector to backup locally to a removable hard drive - but it only backed up that day at 10:00pm as it was meant to, so it wasn't that.

4) I sometimes use Google Drive but only back up to that manually via the 'upload file' button on the webpage, and never directly from my yWriter project file, but instead I  either copy an exported RTF file or zip the project file, then paste to a designated Google Drive folder on my computer and then upload from that folder only.  Also I did not attempt that until much later on the night in question.

5) There is something that took place around that time - being 8:10pm - with my project file.  I had finished for the day and had just done an 'Export Project>to RTF' and then copied that exported file to my computer's Google Drive folder.  I subsequently deleted that same file from the Google Drive folder, according to my recycle bin, at 8:11pm.  I deleted it because I realised I had left a sentence unfinished so had to fix it in the original file first. In order to have noticed the unfinished sentence I would have opened the exported file from the yWriter project in Microsoft Word - so therefore I had done that around the time of the 'retry.yw7' file being made.

6) I also had exported the Report>Synopsis>Summary Short Scene Descriptions into Firefox around that time.

Would any of that exporting caused the 'retry.yw7' to occur? Or, I wonder if it's possible I even had the RTF export mistakenly open in Microsoft Word when I copied it into my computer's Google Drive folder - would that perhaps have triggered it?  

As I said, there is no issue with the project and I wouldn't have expected there to be, having used yWriter versions for a couple of decades now. I am merely curious what might have triggered it to stick around.

KM

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[Simon Haynes]

What happens is that yWriter queues up automatic saves.  When an autosave occurs, if it fails it waits 3 seconds and tries again. If that fails, it means some other program (usually cloud storage) has locked the project file, and then as an emergency measure yWriter will save the project as '_retry' and continue.

If the next autosave works, all good. The retry file is just an emergency copy in case yWriter cannot overwrite the current project file.

(Actually, yWriter renames the project file to .bak and then writes the new version out, but if it's all locked by some 3rd party software, the retry file is the last resort.)

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[KM Lafferty]

Yes, thank you, I knew it would be a failsafe of some sort as you have described - and now having checked I note in Autobackups a full backup was done at 8:10pm, exactly the time stamp of the 'retry file' - that is when I either originally closed the yWriter project or subsequently reopened it nearly straight away.

KM

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