Xojo regularly corrupting my project

On a regular basis when I save a project and come back to it the next day. I find it corrupted, with just an object that says ‘App’. If it was not for Dropbox, months of my work could have vanished so I am not giving up on it.

As I said, I do have Dropbox installed on my computer.
I often save my project for every line of code I write.
When I check the modified date, it says that it was last modified Today. It probably corrupts the file just from opening it.
I NEVER use the built-in recovery system for Xojo. I always find that I have made more progress since the last auto-recovery.

May I ask, when does the recoveries occur? Does recover over a specific period of time? Does recover every time you Run your application?

I can just go and spend my time, downloading the project from Dropbox but could I be more convenient by stopping corruption in the first place?

Thanks

I used to have this all the time a few years ago, but haven’t seen it in a long time. Back then I was using Linux, which seemed to suffer more from corruption issues. Now that I use a Mac I haven’t seen a project corruption in years.

Just guessing here, but it may be possible that it is Dropbox that is contributing to your corruption issues. Perhaps it is trying to access and sync the file at the same time Xojo is writing to it? I also use Dropbox on Mac and I’ve had no such problems, but from my experience with Windows and Dropbox, it seems to behave far less predictably than on a Mac.

As I say, I’m a Mac user so I’m just throwing ideas out there. I still have a habit I developed during my Linux days of duplicating my project file every time before I open it in Xojo. It means I have a backup folder with 100s of older versions of my project, but it makes me feel far more secure.

Oliver, I’d suggest checking your hard drive. If this is happening every day, I’d bet that it’s a hardware problem.

You might also consider that something else entirely (perhaps even Dropbox) is corrupting your files. For example, could Dropbox be syncing down a bad copy of a project?

I work with hundreds of Xojo projects, primarily in binary and text formats, and have never seen one get corrupted. I would expect if this were a Xojo problem, we would be hearing a lot about it.

And in general, for the ultimate peace of mind, I recommend using the Text format with a version control system of some kind (Git or Svn, usually).

I concur… I had an external drive for my projects… and something happened, not to the drive, but the communications channel to the box it was in. about 1/2 the time I would get the same result as you. Swapped out the drive box, reinstalled the same drive and all is good. And TimeMachine now how this drive in its queue… never had a problem since…

Hi Oliver,

I have noticed the same type of issues that you mentioned and have a few tips that seem to make this issue not occur, or at least occur less frequently. Here are some helpful tips that I use over the years that have seemed to keep me from losing code:

  1. Keep all backup systems separate: when backing up a Windows file to a Mac OS, or Mac OS to a Windows file system (such as NTFS, etc), sooner or later all the information will be corrupt. The two operating systems don’t appear to play nice.
  2. If corruption happens from copying Windows OS files to a Mac OS formatted drive, put the Windows drive on a windows machine and run Chkdsk to clean the errors, which has worked well over the years
  3. Keep a backup (which you are already doing) .
  4. Save the Xojo file in two formats: 1) Xojo_Binary_Project and 2) Xojo_XML_Project. If one file system becomes corrupt, then the other file system will likely have your information.
  5. ALWAYS keep a sense of humour :slight_smile: (just thought I would throw that one in)

Others will likely have other tips that they can share. :slight_smile:

In line with Greg and Dave - maybe the first thing you should do now is ensure you have an up-to-date backup to recover from in case it is your hard drive and it fails.

I use an antiquated incremental backup that maybe a way to make sure you keep a working copy : when I am finished working on a project and saved it, I copy the file into a “backup” folder after adding the date to its name. In case of catastrophe, I always have that to come back to.

If you don’t want to change to text format you can at least use external items as xml or binary. If your main project becomes corrupt then you can easily recover. And check out SVN/Git/Mercurial.

Okay, switched over to text format. Thanks people.