Proposal for "auto recovery feature"
I've noted several people have reported losing their work after a crash. Then they were unable to recover from the main backup and could not find any autosaved backups either.
I see the responses that advise people how to find these backups and I find myself thinking the process may be difficult for novice users.
I recall Libreoffice has a feature to recover files that are not saved after a crash. As implemented I find it somewhat annoying, but I like the idea.
Perhaps Musescore could do something similar, looking first for a main backup file (.name*.mscz,) and then look at the autosaved backups in the session directory, present a list of available backup files with last saved date, and let the user choose one to open with a new unique name assigned.
Comments
As I noted elsewhere., the bug that could in very rare cases cause a crash to delete the score is fixed for 2.0.3 - the score should never be lost any more even if a crash happens in the middle of a save operation. So the point is mostly moot.
Anyhow, MuseScore already has a feature to recover files in the event of a crash. The problem was that in this particular rare case, there might not be a file to recover from (or the file might be tool old). It would depend on the timig of when the crash happened. In the vast majority of cases, there *is* an autosave file, it's less than two-minutes old, and MuseScore already does recover it.
Having a dialog that shows other options is not a bad idea also. I'd also prefer it if the recovered file would be given the correct filename (currently it has the full pathname encoded into the filename with underscores as directory separators) and would default to saving in the same folder as the original rather than defaulting to the "working" directory. That would eliminate most of the cases where people can't find the file after having reocvered it, worked on it, then saving it - the saves dont' go back to the original file. I like that you wuld need to prompt for confirmation before saving, but I think it should default to offering to save over the original file, not offering to save under a different name in a different folder.
In reply to As I noted elsewhere., the by Marc Sabatella
>> MuseScore already has a feature to recover files in the event of a crash.
Other than manually (outside Musescore) renaming the backup file or manually seeking out files in the session directory and copying / renaming back to the original folder? I'm not aware of that and my proposal assumed you only had a manual process to go by.
I also assumed some fraction of users had autosave files available after a crash but were unable to find them despite having directions of where to look.
>> I think it should default to offering to save over the original file
in which case I'd suggest the original file first retained / renamed, perhaps to something like mymusic.mscz.suspect or .superceded or whatever. Just in case it actually turns out to be a useful file. I'm sure a shorter but meaningful extension name could be developed.
In reply to >> MuseScore already has a by jim.weisgram
After a crash MuseScore come up and asks whether you want to recover from that crash or not.
In reply to After a crash MuseScore come by Jojo-Schmitz
I think it says a lot about the steadily improving quality of MuseScore that I haven't seen that happen at all.
I think back to 0.96 (I think that was the version) where I started using it and the crashes were usually more than one per working session.
I never lost much work, however, even in the pre-1.0 days. I save work frequently. If I make a big change I like to save before executing the change, then save to a new version number after the change is complete.
In reply to >> MuseScore already has a by jim.weisgram
More specifically, the *next time you start MuseScore after a crash*, it asks you if you want to restore the previous session. This works after 99% of all crashes; it is only those very rare crashes that do not leave behind a valid autosave file (for whatever reason) where this won't happen. So no, *normally* after a crash no one needs to manually do anything at all - it works just like LibreOffice and indeed many other programs I have seen. However, if one declines the offer to restore the previous session, one doesn't get an opportunity to change one's mind later. I don't recall other programs offering such an option either, but if some do, we could consider implementing something similar.
I guess you've never had a crash, then? That's good news, I suppose :-)