On 3 May 2004 at 14:26, Christopher BJ Smith wrote:
> I remember reading a while back about how Finale sometimes overwrites
> a file when more than one file is open. I seem to have been bitten by
> this bug, but I can't reconstruct what I did, as an hour passed before
> I noticed it. What I think happened is this:
>
> I had a score ("Big 1") open I was working on.
>
> I opened another file ("Small 2"), made a small edit, printed it, and
> closed it.
>
> Went back to working on my (still open) "Big 1" score. The next time I
> saved it, it saved under the name and location of the OTHER file,
> overwriting it.
>
> When I later went to open "Small 2", I got my completed "Big 1" score
> instead. The file saved under the name "Big 1" was the version I last
> saved just before I opened the "Small 2" score at around noon, and so
> was incomplete.
>
> Small 2 is gone, gone, gone. When I look to see if I can undo what I
> did in the file called Small 1 (to go back to before the file was
> overwritten), the Undo lists are greyed out.
>
> Is this comparable to what others have observed? I don't use Fin2004
> much yet, so I don't know whether this bug is still around, but it is
> definitely there in FinMac2003.
This is clearly a bad bug in Finale, and needs to be fixed.
But I've also been the victim of mistakes like this that I made
myself, overwriting the wrong file, and losing it entirely.
After one such incident of my own stupidity causing me to possibly
lose a file, I purchased a program to give me delete protection. What
it does is monitor all file deletions and instead of really letting
the OS delete it, hides it from the OS. What it's actually doing is
managing the free chain for the OS (i.e., the list of open sectors on
the hard drive from which are chosen the locations for newly written
file pages). The result of using such a program (and most of the big
utility programs offer such a feature) is that I can never lose data
once it's installed, unless I clear the deletion history.
I use a program called "Executive Undelete"
(http://www.executive.com/undelete/undelete.asp). It's Windows-only,
but works extremely well.
If the bug you describe happened to me in Finale, I'd be able to
recover from it, as each version of the files that were saved would
be available there in the undelete program.
This has saved my bacon so many times, I don't know how I ever worked
without it.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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