All my collection suddenly vanished today! By: tiriviri Date: March 22, 2007
All my collection suddenly vanished today!
Actually this disaster happened twice in the last two weeks.
I have a little more than 2400 records in my collection in 5 different categories which 4 of them created by me.The other one is the default "DVD" category.
My collection file, namely "my collection.mmc" resides in a folder along with the .bak file automatically created by "mediaman".
When I opened the program today everything was gone and the mediaman looked like as if it was just set up.Also the categories I created were gone.
Strange thing was that "my collection.mmc" and "my collection.mmc.bak" files were just there in their place.Only the size of the files were reduced to approximately 61.000 bytes instead of the original 68.493.288 bytes.(seemingly automatic back up didn't work either)
Fortunately I used to create a different backup file on a removable media once or twice in a week but still I had to reenter big numbers of records (A very tiring and boring labor)
I'm Using XP SP2 and rolled back Windows with System Restore to a point that belongs to couple of days ago and my collection was there (of course lacking 4 or 5 day's records)
I've been a meticulous and neat computer user and taking considerable amount of precautions against malware etc.My hard drive is generally full and 2 to 10 GB of empty space remains on the whole.My system is quite stable all the time.No electrical fluctuations (UPS). etc
Mediaman version is 2.66.3 and updating itself automatically.
Can you tell anything about this situation?
All my collection suddenly vanished today! By: He.Shiming Date: March 22, 2007
That's a bit odd. It looks like something went wrong in the saving process. But if it did, MediaMan should at least prompt you.
Would you send the 61,000 bytes collection file to
support@imediaman.com for investigation? Please also try send your 65MB collection file to
support@imediaman.com via
www.yousendit.com, I'll see if there's something wrong caused by the program itself to expose such behavior. Do you mean the the .bak file is the same size as the collection file?
Would you provide a list of running programs on your computer?
Also, could you run a chkdsk /f on the hard drive where your collection file is located to see if there's anything wrong with your hard drive?
I'm not sure if I should point out, but if there's someone else who have access to your computer, he/she can easily open MediaMan and remove all your entries. MediaMan currently do not have operation logs. So I can't know if it's really an intentional manual deletion. You can only check the last modified date on your 60KB collection file, and see if it is really you who accessed this file.
All my collection suddenly vanished today! By: tiriviri Date: March 23, 2007
Unfortunately I couldn't keep a copy of those null files which were approximately 61.000 bytes.But I'm positively sure that the .bak file was the same size as the collection file.I'm afraid I have to wait for the occurance of the same crash situation again in order to send you those files.
For the time being I'm getting a backup of my .mmc file multiple times in a day as an extra precaution.
My computer is the part of a small home network,actually two computers. Although another copy installed in my children's PC ,they don't even use it (Naturally it is not possible for them to access my collection file) In fact they are not really power users of a PC.
Maybe it helps; Here are the list of my guarding and maintenance software; "Avast Antivirus", "Ad-Aware", "Spybot - Search & Destroy" , "Tiny Firewall", "Diskeeper","ProgramChecker".
I never experienced serious system problems and everything works fine for the last couple of years.
All my collection suddenly vanished today! By: He.Shiming Date: March 23, 2007
A program crash could never damage a collection file, you just lost your unsaved changes, that's all. This is by design.
A program malfunctioning (a bug in file handling) may result in corrupted collection files. A hard drive hardware failure or technical problem may also result in similar kind of damage. But usually, these damages appears in the form of, MediaMan popping up huge amount of error messages, or everything looks fine from the begninning, but the program produces error messages or even crashes completely upon reading or modifying certain records. The error message would be a standard Windows message box containing the content similar to this thread:
http://www.imediaman.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=1333 . Sometimes such damages can be repaired. But even with a hard drive failure, a collection file is very unlikely to shrink 1000 times.
In your case, if there's no error pops up, it usually means that the structure of the collection file is fine. Which doesn't look like a program malfunctioning.
Next time you encountered this, check the last modified date for the collection file so you can see if the file is touched by someone else.
My reply to He Shiming's follow up message By: tiriviri Date: April 14, 2007
First of all my appreciations for your close concern with the issue.
Yes I'm still using MediaMan (Because it's the best on the market and still growing.And the developer of the program-that's you- is keeping up his work very closly.Receiving on the fly solutions and answers is a chance for us)
And during this period, no similar behaviors happened again.Maybe it helps;
Untill that moment the program itself was auto-updating itself. After that
I uninstalled the MediaMan.Downloaded the latest version from the web.After
making a deep cleaning to my system I re-installed the MediaMan.Now everything works fine. I'm still taking frequent backups just in case.