That's it, I've been bitten by the data-destroying bug today at work.
I was combining movements from a separate files given by the
composer, to incorporate them into my own template. After I had done
the 2 first movements, I realised that there had been something wrong
in the first insertion of the third movement, so I erased it to
insert it again. For reasons too long to explain here I had to do it
staff by staff (guitar quartet). I started inserting the first staff,
then copied the 3 others in their respective staves. After one of
these copy-paste I realised that the music had vanished, so I closed
the file without saving, having read that the undo wasn't working
with that bug (after all, it seem that it works). I re-opened the
file and started the insert-copy process again, and this time it
worked ok (I did exactly the same thing!).
Now the even more strange part: after that I wanted to delete the
measure I had created and the end to insert the music. As soon as I
deleted that mesure, it deleted the whole score except the page 1, so
I was left with only one page of music instead of 20. Undoing worked
ok, but as soon as I was deleting the measure again the same was
happening. Some time later I tried again, and somehow I succeeded in
removing the extra measure, doing the exact same thing as before.
In a way I feel lucky that I could immediately see the effect of the
data-destroying bug, before it's too late. But as a professional
engraver, can I take such a risk? If I don't see it as it happens,
and the auto-save overwrite with the damaged file, I could lose
nearly a whole day's work, which is unconceivable. I could notice it
only days after that, but I backup my datas every day, so I can
somehow get some of the work back.
Before we started using 2006, we were still using Fin 2003 (I have
all the upgrades though) because everything after that was
unreliable, and eps is so important in our workflow that no eps means
staying with the last version with eps (font warning and slow export
of eps in 2005 was for us unacceptable). With that happening I fear
we are gonna keep away from 2006 until that awful problem is resolved.
How in the world can these people at MM still claime that their
software is made for professional use after all the failures since
finale 2004? (well, I know, they make money out of it!)
Eric Dussault
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