Digital Workshop

What I'm about to describe happens a couple of times a year, or thereabouts. It's been happening since 2000, and has involved 5 different computers across Win98, Win 2000 Pro, and Win XP Pro. The only constant is Opus in its various versions.

A good example is what happened yesterday. I spent all day working on a large pub. I saved every few minutes and backed up about once an hour. Occasionally I publish, just as an extra check that all is OK. When I saved and shut down Opus at the end of the day, every thing was fine.

When I opened the pub this morning, 296 resources were reported as missing. I opened an ran Resource Manager. No joy, still 296 resources missing.

I tried the auto backup copy -- 296 resources missing. I saved it under a different name, and extracted the latest backup. It loaded with no missing resources.

The IMP file contained in the backup ZIP is identical to the latest IMP file. Before I shut down, this is what I did.
1. With my pub open, I saved it.
2. I backed it up.
3. I shut down Opus.

If anyone has an explanation that fits this weird behavious, I'd love to hear it.

Ray,

I haven't had any problems with missing resources, but I have similar strange problems with Opus and always have---on many different PC's Win 2000 and win XP. It happens roughly about 3-4 times a year. The latest was when a page became corrupt and when I re-loaded it, it was blank, however when I shut down and restarted it was OK. At the slightest hint of problems, I re-install Opus and reset the registry. Sometimes I get a warning that something is about to crash----things will start going slowly while editing.
I have never found any one thing which causes a problem.
some examples over the year are:- Page got corrupt; When pub run, it failed to find some of my functions in a script; Component galleries went missing; Copy and paste in script seemed to cause the publication to crash. The most recent problem happened immediately after I had accidentally clicked on the edit actions pane while the mouse was moving and the left pane re-sized, but the resize control disappeared.

I don't think we will ever find out what causes these random, non repeatable events. I just accept they happen now and keep incremental versions and backup's and curse when I get caught out!!!

Sandy

Sandy.

It's good to know that I don't have an overactive imagination.

These regular strange happenings don't bother me, and fortunately many are "temporarily" recovered by a restart or a reboot.

I've encountered weirdos similar to yours, and I have adopted a similar laid back approach to you.

Because of the "regular" need to reinstall Opus or reset the registry, I do not get too carried away with customising Opus. I know I can save various parts of the Opus registry settings, but find it pretty simple to reset the few changes I've made.

Ray,

just a longshot. I notice you have J: dirve. Perhaps you've moved things, or drive letter has shifted up/down due to a change in avail. HDs/volumes, etc.

Check out the last post on two on... viewtopic.php?t=979

good' luck.

Lar

A good suggestion, but in this case, I'm sure that's not the resolution. Why? Let me try and explain.

Only on my current computer have I had J: drive as my main system drive. That came about when the drive was built because I have many hardware items that are assigned a drive allocation. The tech who built this computer didn't notice and re-allocate the drive letters -- which is what I would have done

By the time I noticed this, Win XP was installed (again by the tech) and I'd installed several applications (including Opus) to J:. Over the next couple of months I detected not problems with any software, so I decided to leave things as they were. Had there been problems I would have used Ghost and Partition Magic to reassign drives and move programs.

(actually a hidden benefit has been that some "nasties" which have tried to install in the background have failed because C: just happens to be assigned to a drive for a card reader, and I rarely use it)

Over the years I've installed Opus on different drives, but after one bad experience, I never move Opus or Opus pubs across drives. Actually, I prefer not to move pubs to different directories