files disappearing

[martin66]

Hi, I changed the name of some files in the archive because I wanted to be able to find them again and they disappeared. I cannot find them anywhere. As an experiment I tried changing the name of another file and when I tried to watch it in the viewer it showed a black screen, fair enough as the name had changed, but it also disappeared from the archive! What is happening to my files? I want them back! Thanks, Martin.

[ryan]

Hi Martin,

VDV does not expect users to be touching files in the archive directory. It has internal algorithms to preserve or remove files to meet the disk space quotas the user specifies in settings. If you would like to back up clips or files you will need to move or copy the file outside of the archive directory. If there are specific clips you are trying to preserve I would suggest using the 'export' menu item from inside the application.

Hope that helps,
- ryan

[martin66]

Hi Ryan,
I guessed something like that was happening, but what happens to the files that are removed? They don't seem to be in the recycle bin?
Thanks,
Martin.

[Semper Vaporo]

The "recycle bin" was a Microsoft P.R. coup for all of us humans with fumble fingers that typed a Delete command with the wrong file name! So that the After-The-Fact "Uh-Oh" recognition of what we did can be corrected more easily.

I used to make money in the early days of personal computing because I knew how to recover a file that was deleted by accident. I saved one fellow's Seed Company business when he put all of his records on a DOS based PC and when he ran out of disk space, he decided to delete all of the junk in a "Games" directory. Unfortunately, he mistyped the name of the directory he wanted to clean. He typed; "CD \gamed" (instead of "CD \games") and didn't see the typo before typing "DEL *.*". It took me about 6 hours to recover several hundred files using an early copy of Norton's Utility. (Ah! Those were the days!)

Anyway, when a program is doing the deleting it is assummed it knows what it is doing and unless it specifically moves the file to the Recycle Bin, the file is just deleted.

There are programs/utilities around that can recover a file that has been thus deleted (and they are a whole lot more automated than that early version of Norton's), but they need to be run before any more disk activity occurs or the data on the disk will probably be overwritten by a new file and it is thus permanently gone.

File deletion is somewhat like going to the library and burning the card in the card catalog to delete a book from the shelf. The book remains but cannot be easily found on the shelf because the card is missing. You can recover the book by searching the shelf for books that don't have a card in the catalog and making a new card any books you find. But if someone comes along with a new book for the shelf, they look for books that have no catalog card and upon finding one, they burn the book on the shelf and put the new one in its place and put a new card in the catalog. At that point, the original book is finally permanently deleted.

The Recycle Bin is kind of like; instead of burning the card to delete the book, you put the card in a seperate box (Recycle Bin) until someone needs to put a new book on the shelf but there is no shelf space availble for a new one (i.e.: the disk is full), then the oldest card in that seperate box is destroyed and the book it pointed at is burned and replaced by the new one and a new card is put in the card catalog. Recovering a book is easily done if the card is still in the seperate box by just moving the card back to the catalog; but once the card is removed from seperate box and the shelf space is occupied by a new book then the old book is permanently deleted.

VDV is the owner of all of the files that appear in the Archive directory and since it does not make "Typos", it does not need to attempt to make file recovery available and thus the files are not put in the Recycle Bin. Not only that, but a alot of the time the files are being deleted because it is out of space and needs to use the space occupied by the file it is deleting, so if it did put the file in the Recycle Bin, it would just have to recover space by deleting the entry it just put there.

[martin66]

Thank you, that was very interesting! I understand. I will copy files in future to another location. Regards, Martin.