Crash'n'burn

[Odat]

Being the nerd that I am, I use source control to do something like that.

A neat feature of Blender is that in the save dialog you can press + or - to automatically add or alter a numeric extension at the end of the filename, so it's easy to keep version'd backups. I miss that in a lot of other software. Of course, I also find myself pressing "X" to delete things from time to time, or starting a lot of words with an 'i'. I don't think my brain is set up to handle different things very well.

Back on topic I've been bitten once by the ol' "save and suddenly the document doesn't open" trick. So I make sure to always occasinally save a copy in a separate file as emergency backups along the way (besides using source control for revisioning) just in case.

[colin_e]

Those of us old enough to remember the DEC VAX VMS operating system will remember that by default it automatically created file versions very time you saved a file, then had a "Purge" command to clean up the old versions once in a while. It saved my neck more than once when I trashed the last version accidentally.

Microsoft hired key members of the VMS design team to help them design Windows NT, the grandfather of XP/Vista. Sadly this very useful safety feature in VMS was one thing that got dropped from NT.

As disks get cheaper and online data gets more critical to our lives, I feel it's about time this feature came back.

[Suvek]

Absolutely! I'm interested Thanks

Here you are. Usage is similar to Expander:
xar_read [damaged file] [output file]

It will try to read as much as possible and stop on first error but its not very clever and may miss something critical i.e. output can still contain errors and Xara may not be able to open it. I that case its necessary to stop reading sooner. You can specifiy when to stop in 3rd parameter.

xar_read [damaged file] [output file] 1500
This will read first 1500 tags in file and then stop. You can try to stop 50 or 100 tags before the critical error that stopped automatic processing. ( current position is displayed on console ) Lower the number till you get something useful.

Good luck

[steve.ledger]

Many thanks. I'll try it on the corrupt file next week when I return to the sign shop. I'll let you know if I anything was salvagable from that particular file..

[alexbozhenov]

As for a reason of damaging your xar and bak files I could offer a bad sector (damaged part) at the your hard disk. I met that before, but I didn't use expander...