Please consider recovery feature

I know the main screen says:

"Limitation: Always close FRD properly otherwise you can loose your file list (eg. Windows shutdown with force option...)"

But programmatically it does not have to be this way. You can set it to create a backup copy of the list every 5 minutes -- who cares about stuff lost in the 5 minute window. For the past 2 years I have lost hundreds of hours of effort due to queuing up too many files, and having unexpected crashes. It is really depressing and I've sworn to myself time and again I'd never use FRD again and torture myself! But it is the only program that is awesome in every other regard. So I keep using it. Even now that I have switched from Windows 7 to Linux, I cannot avoid my system randomly freezing at least once a day. In Windows this was caused only by Starcraft 2, but in Linux it is totally random probably because of NVidia. It is sooooo depressing very very depressing to spend 10 hours collecting links and just lose them all. :( please I'm begging you on my hands and knees

- The backup file is created since version 0.65, it's generated together with the main list file (while downloading every 10 seconds)
- There is a links.txt file collecting all added links (see a configuration folder)
- Still always close FRD properly

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/08/2011 06:04PM by Vity.

For some unknown reason we have never been able to reproduce the issue ourselves. It's impossible to fix such problems.

We are possibly considering a workaround, which involves changing the storage format of the link list, but we haven't got very far yet, and with the current number of developers (0 active and 1-3 on-and-off developers) it might never get decided let alone implemented

Thanks so much for the reply, you are awesome for putting such effort into this program.

When you say there is a backup file saved with the main list, are you talking about something separate from the links.txt you mention?

If so, having the same experience across 2 pcs, and 2 operating systems now, I can tell you assuredly it fails to work 75% of the time and everything is lost -- so perhaps there is a slight problem in the way it is implemented.

Meanwhile, I just learned about links.txt today! It is horrible having to redownload many things... but I guess better to double download half the list than lose half of it forever! Thanks for the tip.

Here's my quick idea:

Since this links.txt file exists, ... why not just delete each item in the links.txt when the download hits 100%?

THEN on startup if you detect an empty main list, you can prompt "main list lost in crash, restore all incomplete downloads from list.txt?"

I think this would be fairly easy to implement compared to other solutions and yet solve the issue 100% -- you only lose partial downloads -- who cares.

Also, if you do R/W links.txt I would recommend R/W to a COPY of it each time so it can never got lost in a crash too! =D



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/08/2011 06:37PM by parasitius.

The thing you describe is just a duplicate of functionality how it works today. Recovery is automatic.

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With the small caveat that unless I'm a complete freak, my experience on 2 machines, 2 versions of windows, and one version of linux shows the list still get lost most of the time when a system locks up = there is a definite bug in the implementation or in the design. MS Word's auto-recovery doesn't, for example, randomly lose its back-ups of your work.

My machine crashed this morning. I tried to figure out how to restore my download list. I found file in configuration folder named 'FRD71600templist.txt', I renamed it to 'filesList.xml', and it worked. I've my download list back.

I just had a 2 second power outage while FRD was running, and the download list was perfectly intact when I started it again.

IMO increasing download list autosave time will give better protection to the corruption. There is autosave time parameter/option, the default value is 10 seconds as Vity said. Add this to 'startup.properties' :

-DautosaveTime=xx

where xx is time in seconds, for example 60.

CMIIW.