| Index » PageStream Support » General » Mystery file shrinkage - to 0kb |
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| 2012-06-12 08:42:43 CT | #1 |
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Joseph Hogan From: Canada Registered: 2008-03-23 Posts: 25 |
Hello, I was looking going to start a new document this morning for my company. I was going to take an existing document so that I would have the same It turns out that half og my files (originals and the accompanying back I lost a couple of files because the originals AND back ups are at 0kb. I am using a Mac: 10.6.8 PS - latest pro version. It is like they are being corrupted to 0kb. Anyone ever seen this? Joe
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| 2012-06-12 14:53:51 CT | #2 |
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Terence D Casey From: Unknown Registered: 2004-03-02 Posts: 34 |
Hello Joe, Thank you for your message of 12 Jun 2012, at 13:42. I have experienced this a few times when the original document and up to three PageStream backups won't open (This file is not recognised) and show up as 0kb. I have sometimes been able to recover the document from a Mac 'Time Machine' backup but sometimes the 'Time Machine' backs are also corrupted in the same way. In this case I have to reconstruct the original document from scratch (or more often from an earlier edition of the document). If anyone comes up with a reason for why this happens and more importantly with a way to recover the original document in this situation I would be very happy. With many thanks, Cheerio, Terence Casey PGS 5.0.5.8 Pro running on Mac OS 10.6.8 ---------------------------------------------------
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] |
| 2012-06-12 13:36:19 CT | #3 |
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David L. Stevens From: United States Registered: 2006-02-23 Posts: 567 |
On 6/12/2012 8:53 AM, Terence Casey wrote: -- DAVID L. STEVENS -- TEAM AMIGA -- *** |
| 2012-06-12 21:44:26 CT | #4 |
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T.J. Zweers From: Netherlands Registered: 2006-02-07 Posts: 331 |
Hello all, I experienced this once or twice (Windows). There are solutions for this... (in Preferences/General) Not too much help here. But with this you might retrace what you were Theo Op 12-6-2012 20:36, David L. Stevens schreef:
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| 2012-06-12 15:11:50 CT | #5 |
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Tim Doty From: United States Registered: 2006-02-06 Posts: 2939 |
Hi Terence, Reading your email again I notice that you say that even time machine backups are no good. That suggests data corruption outside of PgS -- it isn't able to corrupt what is backed up in time machine -- unless it was corrupted somehow on saving and you didn't notice for some time. I don't recall every having PgS corrupt a document like that. I vaguely recall some issues when I was switching from Amiga to linux and I don't use PgS as much as once did (though I still use it frequently and that has picked up again recently) -- but I have *lots* of PgS documents and nowadays they are predominantly created and edited on OS X. Aside from my previous recommendation for autosave and the various recommendations for having PgS keep backup copies -- not much to say, really. Time machine is great, but it only preserves what is there. A flurry of edit/save cycles may result in a single copy backed up in time machine, while PgS backup copies gives you a solid history based on your saving it. I'm pretty serious about not losing data and there are some additional things you can do: - par2: this doesn't help against a bad save, but it helps in the event of disk corruption. By using PgS on-save scripting functionality parity files could be generated when saving a document. - version control: more commonly seen in software development, using cvs, svn, git, mercurial, etc., provides a way to keep a strict and complete history of a document, again by leveraging PgS on-save scripting functionality. I use this with PgS built-in revision history to store document revisions in mercurial. - backup service: I like Time Machine, but all services have their pros and cons. I use spider oak to provide secure* off-site backups that *also* provide a history of saves. Time Machine is essentially a batch-save for the entire computer. SpiderOak is an almost real-time backup for select files. (I just checked log history and a document I'm working on has 11 revisions for Sunday alone backed up to SpiderOak -- some saved within the same minute.) The point is, they complement each other. But bottom line is this: if the document was never written to disk there's no way to get it back. All of these efforts are to preserve what was once written to disk. (Okay, maybe if you are uber-geeky, get a ram dump while the document is loaded in memory or use swap space, and extract the PgS document from that.) Tim Doty * all off-site backup services claim encryption and security, but there are very, very few (only three that I know of) that actually encrypt your data in a meaningful way. If privacy isn't a concern then there are a lot more options. It is pretty off topic here, but something I'm willing to discuss in more detail. On Jun 12, 2012, at 8:53 AM, Terence Casey wrote: > Hello Joe, |
| 2012-06-13 21:14:53 CT | #6 |
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Tim Doty From: United States Registered: 2006-02-06 Posts: 2939 |
I must say I've been *very* pleased with PgS's autosave functionality. Twice now I've had PgS crashes on OS X that took out a PgS document with unsaved changes. Looking at the document is no good (it wasn't saved) and the auto back files have the same issue. What I've discovered is that PgS will have created a *.tmp file in the backup folder. Don't mind the extension, open it in PgS and, voila, the document is there. IIRC this doesn't help on a document that has never been saved (the .tmp never gets created) -- just make sure to save out the document ASAP and have autosave enabled. Tim Doty
> Hello Joe, |
| 2012-06-14 16:35:26 CT | #7 |
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Terence D Casey From: Unknown Registered: 2004-03-02 Posts: 34 |
Hello Tim, Thank you for your message of 12 Jun 2012, at 21:11. I have now looked into this a bit more and it appears that the file is corrupted on saving. You can have the document open on the screen for as long as you like. You can edit it, add to it, even print from it and all appears normal.But as soon as you save it and close it the file is reduced to 0kb. The unfortunate thing is that the same seems to happen when PGS saves backups. When they are saved they become a 0kb file. Even more unfortunately when the time comes for 'Time Machine' to make an external backup it backs up these 0kb files so there is no way to get back to the original. I have now looked a bit more into these 0kb files. PGS cannot open them. You just get the message 'File format is not recognised'. However, the file is still there and can be opened with 'TextEdit'. If you scroll through this various bits of recognisable text from the original document appear but they are disjointed and could not be used to reconstruct the original document. And, of course, any pictures are completely unrecognisable. If you then save the'TextEdit' file and check it with file information the file size is reported as something similar to what the original PGS file should have been. In this particular case about 12Mb. From this further study I am convinced that the files are being corrupted when they are saved and that this, therefore, must be a PageStream bug. Thank you for all the advice about backing up and autosaving etc. After losing one document and partially losing a couple of others I have been much more careful in doing all these things. I had assumed that the problem arose from something I was doing or not doing but after Joe reported a similar experience I decided to raise it in this forum because it is more likely that it is a PGS bug. I could send you one of the 0kb files if you would like to look at it but I would need your e-mail address. With many thanks, Cheerio, Terence ------------------------------------------------- > Hi Terence, [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] |
| 2012-06-14 16:45:11 CT | #8 |
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Tim Doty From: United States Registered: 2006-02-06 Posts: 2939 |
Hi Terence, On Jun 14, 2012, at 10:35 AM, Terence Casey wrote: > Hello Tim, what you say certainly indicates that. A question then is why do not others (such as myself) see it. > [snip] > However, the file is still there and can be opened with 'TextEdit'. If you scroll through this various bits of recognisable text from the original document appear but they are disjointed and could not be used to reconstruct the original document. And, of course, any pictures are completely unrecognisable. This indicates that something is seriously wrong with the file system. If the file is reported as 0kb then it is not taking up any space in the file system. To be able to open the file with something else and have contents means that the file system is "lying" and saying that the file is empty, but then providing the contents anyway. As you are on OS X > I could send you one of the 0kb files if you would like to look at it but I would need your e-mail address. I don't think that'd help. To be honest I'd be curious to take a look at the file system, but that pretty much requires that I be there in person. The approach would be to take a forensic look at the file system. I have some ideas as to what the nature of the corruption might be, but it is curious that exists in the first place. Not likely to recover any data, but here are some things you might try to gain insight/prevent future issues: 1. Repair the file system. If it is the boot volume it should be being checked and repaired on boot, but start /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, select the volume with the corrupt files and click the repair file system button. 2. Check system logs for information. /Applications/Utilities/Console is Apple's viewer for system logs. As you likely don't have the background for reading them it may not be much use, but there may be a record of failures to repair the file system on boot, etc. 3. Check SMART status for the drive. Go to the Apple menu and select 'About This Mac'. Click the 'System Report' button (at least, in 10.7 that's what it's called). Under Hardware scroll down to Serial-ATA, select the drive from the device tree (probably already selected) and scroll down the information view as necessary to see the "S.M.A.R.T. status". The drive on my laptop says 'Verified'. Regrettably, Apple doesn't provide a view into the smart data. I've seen multiple drives with hard failures that report 'Ok' on the dumb status, but when interrogated for full status reveal bad sector counts, etc. There's a wonderful utility on Linux that lets you get this information -- there may be something available for OS X as well, I haven't looked. On the other hand, this is veering off topic for the list… Tim Doty ok i thought one could do this in pgs, can you take an object like a picture or drawing and have it behave like text, so the object flows with the text, rather that being just staticly placed on the page? [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] |
| 2012-07-14 15:39:02 CT | #9 |
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Don Green Dragon From: Unknown Registered: 2011-12-10 Posts: 58 |
Hi Tim, On 13Jun2012, at 8:14 PM, Tim Doty wrote: <<snip>> Very useful tip. Thanks Tim.
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