Save session data for crash recovery.

[TW]

Dalai,
A crashing system is never OK but that's not a reason not to implement autosave in Word, actually, it's quite the opposite.

Roman

agree with this. a lot of programs do this.

and it sometimes is hard to find what makes your system crash. can be bad drivers, also bad RAM. overheating (dust inside the system, overclocked) and so on.

my laptop "bluescreens" too, it didn't for the last 4 months, but sometimes twice in a month. and it also happens when i'm away.
i just cannot reproduce it at all, it just happens, i tried many different drivers etc, no luck.

[Dalai]

2Hacker
I agree to some degree. But what about other programs? I find it quite silly to implement some auto-save in every program. Yes, it might help to avoid losing data (the symptom), but it doesn't stop the crashes (the cause). IMO it's much better to eliminate the cause to cure the symptoms. Furthermore, there's lots of stuff to save in TC alone, yet it doesn't prevent losing any data because the OS decides what to write to disk and when to do it. TC could save the data, but it may still be in the cache while the system crashes -> you end up losing data.

Regards
Dalai

[avada]

4 years and your not able to fix your crashing system?

YOU are simple NOT able to understand what YOU want doesnt work:
lets say tc writes data the moment your BROKEN system crashes it will do even MORE damage....

whatever float your boat enjoy your BROKEN system and welcome to ignore....

Tell that to all the browser vendors who have well functioning crash recovery. Those things can be dealt with, copy-on-write is not a complicated concept.

Abusing capital letters won't make your point be stronger. It makes you look more desperate.

(You're having silly assumptions again. The frequent crashing is a recent development. Although lost sessions were annoying before that. I also have more power outages here than most)

2avada
I agree with Sir_SiLvA, although he expressed his thoughts quite bluntly. Why? Well, you could be losing other data as well in the crashes, from other programs or even your documents, pictures, videos and so on. Maybe you don't even notice because the data is already written to the disk. But you can't be sure about that! System crashes are always an indication of some deeper issue, either in hardware and/or in software.

I don't understand what the two of you are trying to achieve. Did you two wage a holy war against crash recovery? Would it pain you to have it?

Systems/software crashs, in which case crash recovery comes really handy. That's why I started this request. (which I rewarmed after seeing v9 brings deeper changes)

As for my system. If it bothers you two so much you could send me money to buy a brand new PC. Otherwise I'm going to hold onto it a while longer.

Of course I have data loss. The most annoying of which is prevented by Firefox's (with the Session Manager addon) crash recovery. (It can even restore half-written comments most of the time).
The second most annoying is TC.

[avada]

Dalai,
A crashing system is never OK but that's not a reason not to implement autosave in Word, actually, it's quite the opposite.

Roman

I was starting to think no-one has sense anymore.

2Hacker
I agree to some degree. But what about other programs? I find it quite silly to implement some auto-save in every program. Yes, it might help to avoid losing data (the symptom), but it doesn't stop the crashes (the cause). IMO it's much better to eliminate the cause to cure the symptoms.

Regards
Dalai

A bunch write their configuration or other data as soon as you change them. (typically ones that don't have it in an ini file.) Other's have explicit session recovery.

IMO it's much better to eliminate the cause to cure the symptoms.

That's very easy to say. Let's just eliminate every potential cause for a crash and there will never be a crash again!
Sometimes you can eliminate the cause sometimes you can't. Other times you get crashes from various other causes.

TC could save the data, but it may still be in the cache while the system crashes -> you end up losing data.

Not sure you're right. Even so even then it would be less of a data loss. The saved data would be more recent.

[Hacker]

Dalai,

IMO it's much better to eliminate the cause to cure the symptoms.

Often it's simply not feasible.

TC could save the data, but it may still be in the cache while the system crashes -> you end up losing data.

I do not see that <1% risk as a reason not to implement autosave.

Roman

[Dalai]

TC could save the data, but it may still be in the cache while the system crashes -> you end up losing data.

Not sure you're right. Even so even then it would be less of a data loss. The saved data would be more recent.

More recent data isn't always better than older data, data integrity is important, too. Sometimes the data would be more recent but corrupt because the file-system has become inconsistent.

Yes, some kind of mechanism to write TC's settings while it's running would be nice, but I doubt that it would help against data loss, even less in terms of data integrity. Crashes are different, can have different causes and so on, so nobody can tell whether the data was correctly written to disk.

2Hacker
Where'd you get this number? You can't just throw in any number, since it certainly depends on how much resources the system uses, how much processes are running, what processes are active and how they use their memory pages. And I'm sure there're other factors involved.

Regards
Dalai

[Hacker]

Dalai,

Where'd you get this number?

It looked best to me. But you are arguing against a feature to mitigate system crashes on the off chance that it might not help in some cases, ignoring that it would help in all other cases. That does not make sense.

EDIT: I mean absolutely no offense, but the logic flaw reminded me of this Dilbert comic - http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-02-23

Roman

[Dalai]

But you are arguing against a feature to mitigate system crashes on the off chance that it might not help in some cases, ignoring that it would help in all other cases. That does not make sense.

Yeah, well, that's where you don't get my point. I think that it won't help in most cases, only in some cases in which the data has been written to disk correctly. So, there's no logic error here, just different assumptions. If you assume that it would help in most cases, then yes, by all means, it makes sense to implement such a feature. But if you assume that it wouldn't help in most cases, then it doesn't really make sense to put time and effort into it, don't you think?

Regards
Dalai

[sirsilver]

first you start by CLAIMING

I miss this feature very much. I lost several hours of changes countless times, when for some reason TC was terminated abnormally.

which sounds like TC crashed....

4 years later its the SYSTEM (aka OS) that crashes all the time:

Unfortunately I get system crashes/hangs and whatnot
rather often.

You just keep assuming, and not even reading what I said.

on the contrary

I never claimed TC was crashing, I wrote explicitly that my system does, so nothing to report.

WRONG!

I miss this feature very much. I lost several hours of changes countless times, when for some reason TC was terminated abnormally.

4 years later you wrote about system crashes/hangs....

Then you contradict yourself:

You assume I didn't do anything to fix this, that's also wrong.

I just couldn't.

So did you fix your system or not?

You're seriously claiming restarting a program is anywhere near equivalent to crash recovery?

No, I have shown you a way which would save your "precious" tabs
(but you of course choose to ignore this because you dont care for a solution as
with tc9 you can now use even a keycombo with the savetabs-cmd.....)
because "crash recovery" is NOT a thing that is tcs business as thats not what it was created for.....

That's clossing the session, not making it more secure.

NO, thats a RESTART....

2avada
I agree with Sir_SiLvA, although he expressed his thoughts quite bluntly.

Yes because I dont sugar coat - sue me

A crashing system is never OK but that's not a reason not to implement autosave in Word, actually, it's quite the opposite.

Did you seriously just compared TC to Word? *tripple-facepalm*
How about instead comparing it with irfanview and wanting it to save his ini file every 29 seconds?

Tell that to all the browser vendors who have well functioning crash recovery.

you too like comparing citrones and apples, do you?....

As I started out:
So you DO want TC jump through HOOPS just because YOU cant fix your (proven to be [by you]) broken (and unfixable) system.
So instead of writing its ini-files like it is doing now (and has been for decades) just for you the system had to be changed.
So all inis are getting cached in tmp first and only be written later to their true destination which is NOT how handling inis work.
(and lets not even start about backward compability)

I don't understand what the two of you are trying to achieve. Did you two wage a holy war against crash recovery? Would it pain you to have it?

getting you to fix your system cause
#1 working an a system that ruins files anyway is kinda pointless
#2 its not TCs job to recover anything if the flaw is YOUR fault.

A bunch write their configuration or other data as soon as you change them. (typically ones that don't have it in an ini file.) Other's have explicit session recovery.

Wrong again! Ini based data is stored the moment you changed it.

Not sure you're right. Even so even then it would be less of a data loss.

Yes, he IS right cause he KNOWS what he is talking about and No, on the contrary it would even be a bigger loss as it could ruin your whole tc.ini and then ALL your settings would be lost......

Often it's simply not feasible.

then you shouldnt have files on the system nor work on it.

It looked best to me. But you are arguing against a feature to mitigate system crashes on the off chance that it might not help in some cases, ignoring that it would help in all other cases. That does not make sense.

because wanting such thing from tc is simple ignorant.
if one is worried about his precious tabs: cm_ConfigSaveSettings
BOOM all saved (that even works with tc8)
(apart from the fact that wheres a will theres a way to fix crashes...)

to use your own BRILLIANT example Hacker:
you expect people to press strg+s when working on IMPORTANT stuff in word
so why not in tc?....

problem (that didnt even existed) solved

[mod]The ban is valid also for alternative nicknames used to circumvent the ban.

Hacker (Moderator)[/mod]

[Hacker]

Dalai,

I think that it won't help in most cases

I don't get it. If a system crashes, say, once a week, and TC saves its config every ten 10 minutes for half a second, why do you assume that in most cases the system crashes exactly during those 0,5 seconds while TC is saving its config? All else being equal, the chance of this happening is 1:1200.

Roman

[Hacker]

sirsilver,
Even though my common sense tells me not to, I'll try, so others don't have to.

which sounds like TC crashed

"TC was terminated abnormally" does not mean TC itself crashed, it means "TC was terminated abnormally", eg. BSOD, reboot or any other unexpected termination of TC.

So did you fix your system or not?

No, despite the tries, the system was not fixed.

then you shouldnt have files on the system nor work on it.

You are talking about a bug free system which does not exist.

cm_ConfigSaveSettings

Yup, that one is very useful. I don't think it would hurt anyone if there was an ini option AutoSaveSettingsEveryXMinutes=10.

Roman

[Dalai]

[...] why do you assume that in most cases the system crashes exactly during those 0,5 seconds while TC is saving its config?[...]

I don't. TC writes the config, but the OS writes it to disk! Until it's on disk, there's a big chance to lose data (e.g. due to NTFS journaling or because the data is still in the cache) or corrupt it (incompletely written blocks). So, it may take several seconds until the data is really written to disk.

I don't know if there's some function to force the system to flush the cache, i.e. write the data to disk, but somehow I doubt it since the INI functions are really old and deprecated (in MS's point of view).

Regards
Dalai

[Hacker]

Dalai,

Until it's on disk, there's a big chance to lose data (e.g. due to NTFS journaling or because the data is still in the cache) or corrupt it (incompletely written blocks).

How big? Basically what I understand from what you are saying is that each cached disk write is a disaster just waiting to happen and the fewer writes the better.
Do you consider this valid also for Word's autosave?

Roman

[Dalai]

How big?

That depends on the system, how much resources are used, the alorithm that's used to write the cache (file-system buffer) to disk and many other factors.

Basically what I understand from what you are saying is that each cached disk write is a disaster just waiting to happen and the fewer writes the better.

In terms of data loss/integrity in case of a crash: yes. But I'm not talking about fewer writes to disk, but rather bypassing the file-system buffer to ensure the data is written. There's a reason it isn't recommended to enable caches on USB flash drives and other external drives. The surprise removal of those drives is very similar to a system crash, regarding the data on the external drive at least.

In short: if you really want to make sure that TC saves your settings you have to force the system to flush the file-system buffer (only TC's data of course), thus writing the data to disk. Otherwise you can't be sure it really gets there correctly (uncorrupted). To make one thing clear: I'm not talking about the cache of the drive/disk itself, only the OS's buffer/cache. If the data is still on the drive's cache, it's out of TC's, and even the OS's, hand.

Do you consider this valid also for Word's autosave?

From what I understand, Word saves some recovery information, not the file itself. If Word (or the system) crashes it shows some dialog on the next execution to recover the data that hasn't been written to the file itself. Don't know how reliable that works since I'm not using Office programs that much (and fortunately I have rock-stable systems).

Regards
Dalai

[Hans.Müller]

which sounds like TC crashed

"TC was terminated abnormally" does not mean TC itself crashed, it means "TC was terminated abnormally", eg. BSOD, reboot or any other unexpected termination of TC.

oK so now you get silly just to be silly?
When someone comes to the tc board and starts a topic with "TC was terminated abnormaly" its OFC a tc crash what you expect.

then you shouldnt have files on the system nor work on it.

You are talking about a bug free system which does not exist.

*tripple facepalm* are you even reading anymore the "blödsinn" you write? I never talked about a "bug free" system but fixing regular system crashes

cm_ConfigSaveSettings

Yup, that one is very useful. I don't think it would hurt anyone if there was an ini option AutoSaveSettingsEveryXMinutes=10.

No, it would only ruin the ini-file cause the system would crash the moment the auto-save writes. thats a fact based on murphys law