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Automatic backup of project file

10/22/2021 12:46:15 PM
Suggestions
Pete K author

Yesterday ASPRunner crashed on me after 2 hours of work. When I restarted the project, of course none of my 2 hours of work was there. I rememebred seeing backup zip files in the past and assumed that there was an auto backup happeneing from time to time. But in examining the files, I see that it only seems to backup when the project is saved. This is unfortunate. Crashes are rare, but they do happen.

My suggestion is to add an option to auto-backup at least the project file every x minutes. Is that easily doable?

A
AlphaBase 10/22/2021

Yeah. I'm paranoid punk pig, so I save every minute or two. I wish they would put a Save button on the menu-bar so one wouldn't have to always drill down into the menu. But strangely, there is 0 doucmentation about the built-in backup feture which saved me a few times when I got into a jam.

Pete K author 10/22/2021

Believe me, I've been saving often today! By the way, I've found that CTRL + S works to save sometimes, but not always. I wonder why that is.

admin 10/22/2021

CTRL+S should save project file from anywhere. If it doesn't work in some situations and this behaviour is reproducible you should contact support with more info so this can be fixed.

@Pete K

Unfortunately automated backups are not straightforward. First of all, saving the project is not an instant process and will distract the user what they were doing. Second, if you are in the middle of some changes you may end up with non-working copy of the project. We believe that creating a backup copy of the proejct when user saves the project is a bit safer option. We do understand the need of a better backup process and it will be addressed in version 11 when we plan to switch to a completely different way to store the project file i.e. in the database.

@AlphaBase

You can find the info about backup folder located in this article:
https://xlinesoft.com/phprunner/docs/working_with_projects.htm#project_struct

It is the first search result in PHPRunner manual for "backup" so there is no need to spread the misinformation.

A
AlphaBase 10/23/2021

Okay, there are two lines buried in there. No wonder I didn't see it. The first line of those two also needs to be corrected. It says:

The tmp\backup directory stores backup copies of your project.

The backup file may have been at that location in a previous version of PHPR, but now it's on the same level as the other subdirectories,

It would be helpful to have a heading about "Backups" in the Help file with a little bit of explanation of the algorithm that PHPR uses. Like I said, it's a great feature.

Pete K author 11/3/2021

Admin, thanks for the reply and the explanation. That makes sense to me. I haven't noticed the issue of CTRL+S not working recently; perhaps it was fixed in an update or was just a random glitch. I am excited to see the changes in version 11.

M
MikeT 11/3/2021

i use the export function as a safety net. The nice thing is that you can save all assets and the db-schema with it and it adds the date/time to the archive.
And the project folder is of course included in an automatic backup job.

I see the export moments a bit like check ins in version control, I'm doing them on major changes, and in between just saves.
(Sometime I also use actual version control on the project folder with subversion).