System crash/lockup and UE settings persistence

The Cat · Post by **The Cat** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 8:45 am

When the computer crashes (not a usenet fault) I have the problem that I have to reconfigure Usenet Explorer a lot. Almost al my subsciptions are gone and I think Usenet screwed up the database also, because when opening for instance alt.binaries.cores it showed some headers from alt.binaries.warez.uk. A bit funny if you press F4 and you can see that the header does not belong in alt.bin.cores.
In Newspro you could set the properties to make a extra backup. Is this also with UE possible?
Anyone else having problems recovering UE after a major computer crash?

Bert · Post by **Bert** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 1:41 pm

In principle, when you did Menu File>"Save All" UE should begin in that saved state after a crash.

In v1.1 there is an option to do save all every n minutes.
If you set this to 5, you never loose more than 5 minutes work after a crash.

Did you add these groups in the same session UE (or windows)crashed? That could be a reason. Normally only new headers would be lost (when save all isn't used).

The Cat · Post by **The Cat** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 2:44 pm

The groups were their already. But thanks for the tip about save all.
It still does not explain why a post ended up in the wrong group though.

Hubert · Post by **Hubert** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 4:16 pm

Maybe it's a database issue. There's a database integrity check in the Help->Diagnostics menu. Since you're having repeated crashes it's also a good idea to run a memory test: http://www.netwu.com/newspro/MemTest.zip

The Cat · Post by **The Cat** » Sun Jul 31, 2005 4:40 pm

THX, but it is not a memory issue. At the moment I have some problems with my GT6600 card which sometimes causes the system to crash. And since UE is always running

But I wil run the integrity check. I had not found that option yet

The Cat · Post by **The Cat** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 7:36 am

Yesterday it happened again. A lock up of my machine (not UE related) so I had to hard reset the machine. When I opened UE again I was missing half of my usegroups. The save option was turned on and I had not made any changes since the last time I started up UE. This is really a pain in the ... I did not find it a problem that I could not import the usegroups from Newspro. But in Newspro I could export the Newgroups I had a subscription on so that with a reinstall of the system I could import all my settings again. Now with a crash of my computer I have to hope that UE remembers all my subscriptions or manually subscribe again to (a lot) of groups again. This is not funny.

dengle · Post by **dengle** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 11:04 pm

once you reconfigure the newsgroup subscriptions, do you save and restart UE? It should not lose the list of groups subscribed.

I have also had unplanned reboots (power outage for instance) and have never experienced the issue you are describing.

jaapf · Post by **jaapf** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 6:53 pm

If you perform the [ctrl][s] every now and then, all changes to your database's should be saved.

The Cat · Post by **The Cat** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 7:55 pm

This I know offcourse. I have set in the properties general tab the save option on 30 minutes. But I will do some more testing next week to see if I can reproduce this.

hholland · Post by **hholland** » Mon Aug 08, 2005 2:23 am

This really doesn't sound like a UE issue. Disk casching/delayed writing would account for lost data, but not from "long ago". If the groups were there before (on startup), then they should be next time (even if new ones added were lost), sounds like something is hacking up your drive data

Hal

alex · Post by **alex** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 12:54 pm

all settings are in reg.dat

ue flushes reg.dat data all the time, but maybe the system doesn't provide for immediate writing the data to the hard drive, but only flushing file buffers into the system file cache, thus if the system freezes the data still will be lost. and i cannot change the way the system works.

probably it is a good idea to go after the cause of the system freezes (replace video card? - i also had a problem with video card when starting computer, needed to start it repeatedly, replaced it and the problem has gone).

in principle you can also make a copy of reg.dat somewhere.

i'll try to check towards the next release whether i can provide some kind of automatic backup, just the file is like system registry and as to the system registry it creates backup copy on start and if it gets corrupted this way it will restore it from backup (so all changes since the last backup will be lost), i saw it once when i had hardware problems here.