Problems with stability

[dmc]

I've been having problems with stability in EagleFiler. It's been crashing far too often and in a couple of cases it has caused files to be corrupted. I've started to send my error reports to make you aware, but I'm starting to get concerned about the integrity of my data.

Twice while I was moving a file from the library to a folder, EF crashed. When I restarted I was notified that there was a problem with one of the files, the one I was moving when it crashed. The file appeared in the library with a size of 0kb and was no longer on my hard drive. Neither was a critical loss, the first I had a backup copy and the second was text I grabbed from a webpage. But at this point I'm hesitant to keep anything in EF unless I have a backup.

I had a different problem today. I opened EF and the Activity Monitor showed it was indexing all my notes (it does this pretty often). I used the Services menu to capture some text from a page. EF crashed at this point. I reopened EF and tried to recreate this problem. It didn't crash the next time, I did get this error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 224: ordinal not in range(128)


Are these known problems that will be addressed in the next release?

Thanks.

[Michael Tsai]

I'm aware of several different crashing bugs and have fixed them (or added a workaround in the cases where the bug is in a library that EagleFiler uses) for the next release. The UnicodeDecodeError that you reported is actually a bug in the error reporting code, which prevents you from seeing the underlying error; this is also fixed.

I'm not aware of any problems where data is lost. Once a file is in the library, it should stay intact even if EagleFiler crashes. This is because all EagleFiler does is read the file or ask the OS to move it. When you say that it showed a size of 0KB, that probably means that the file is not where EagleFiler expected it to be, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the file is gone. For example, EagleFiler may have successfully moved the file to the new location, but it crashed before it was able to update its database--so the file is in the new location, but EagleFiler is looking in the old one.

[dmc]

That makes sense that the reported size woudl be zero if it was looking for a nonexistent file. If it happens again, I will look to see if it is indeed somewhere else.

Thank you.

[Michael Tsai]

EagleFiler 1.1 (http://c-command.com/blog/2006/12/06/eaglefiler-11/) fixes various crashing bugs as well as the error reporting bug that you mentioned.