Mari Kimura

When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is 

there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do? It 

seems like such a basic user interface.... I just lost 30 minutes of 

Please visit my NEW Blog: "Extended Violin Diary"

When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is  
there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do?  It  
seems like such a basic user interface....   I just lost 30 minutes of  
work!  :)

---------------
http://www.marikimura.com

Please visit my NEW Blog: "Extended Violin Diary"
http://subharmonics.blogspot.com/


auto-save-backup

On 6 nov. 08, at 07:17, Mari Kimura wrote:

> When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is 

> there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do? 

> It seems like such a basic user interface.... I just lost 30 

Well the first rule of using a computer is "save your work as often as 

you can" (the second is "make backups as often as you can"). Look at 

the archive , there's a few people who have made some patches which 

On 6 nov. 08, at 07:17, Mari Kimura  wrote:

> When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is  
> there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do?   
> It seems like such a basic user interface....   I just lost 30  
> minutes of work!  :)

Well the first rule of using a computer is "save your work as often as  
you can" (the second is "make backups as often as you can"). Look at  
the archive  , there's a few people who have made some patches which  
implements some auto backup system.

It is possible, that Max saves a last version right before it crashes, into the same folder that your patch was stored before, under almost the same name, but with a 2 or 3-digit number attached to it. that's waht happens when max crashes here, and this already worked with mac 4.6 as well.

i am not sure that this would work on pc, i am on osx 10.4.11.

Mari, when you're on a Mac:
It is possible, that Max saves a last version right before it crashes, into the same folder that your patch was stored before, under almost the same name, but with a 2 or 3-digit number attached to it. that's waht happens when max crashes here, and this already worked with mac 4.6 as well.
i am not sure that this would work on pc, i am on osx 10.4.11.


Yes I know I know :) Save, save, and save... I just forgot while 

writing my patch. But then I just wondered since other commercial 

programs, even Microsoft Word, would have a 'rescue' auto-save and you 

can recover the file, which isn't unreasonable for users at all, 

especially when programs like Logic and LIVE auto-saves the files 

On Nov 6, 2008, at 4:04 AM, Emmanuel Jourdan wrote:

> On 6 nov. 08, at 07:17, Mari Kimura wrote:

>> When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is 

>> there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do? 

>> It seems like such a basic user interface.... I just lost 30 

> Well the first rule of using a computer is "save your work as often 

> as you can" (the second is "make backups as often as you can"). Look 

> at the archive , there's a few people who have made some patches 

> which implements some auto backup system.

Yes I know I know  :)   Save, save, and save... I just forgot while  
writing my patch.   But then I just wondered since other commercial  
programs, even Microsoft Word, would have a 'rescue' auto-save and you  
can recover the file, which isn't unreasonable for users at all,  
especially when programs like Logic and LIVE auto-saves the files  
before the crash.

> On 6 nov. 08, at 07:17, Mari Kimura  wrote:
>
>> When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is  
>> there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do?   
>> It seems like such a basic user interface....   I just lost 30  
>> minutes of work!  :)
>
> Well the first rule of using a computer is "save your work as often  
> as you can" (the second is "make backups as often as you can"). Look  
> at the archive  , there's a few people who have made some patches  
> which implements some auto backup system.
>
> ej

Thanks, but I didn't find the recovered patch... I'm on 10.5.4 using 

On Nov 6, 2008, at 7:37 AM, jayrope wrote:

> It is possible, that Max saves a last version right before it 

> crashes, into the same folder that your patch was stored before, 

> under almost the same name, but with a 2 or 3-digit number attached 

> to it. that's waht happens when max crashes here, and this already 

> i am not sure that this would work on pc, i am on osx 10.4.11.

Thanks, but I didn't find the recovered patch...   I'm on 10.5.4 using  
Max5 (for this project that crashed)
mk

> Mari, when you're on a Mac:
> It is possible, that Max saves a last version right before it  
> crashes, into the same folder that your patch was stored before,  
> under almost the same name, but with a 2 or 3-digit number attached  
> to it. that's waht happens when max crashes here, and this already  
> worked with mac 4.6 as well.
> i am not sure that this would work on pc, i am on osx 10.4.11.

On 6 nov. 08, at 15:52, Mari Kimura wrote:

> Yes I know I know :) Save, save, and save... I just forgot while 

> writing my patch. But then I just wondered since other commercial 

> programs, even Microsoft Word, would have a 'rescue' auto-save and 

> you can recover the file, which isn't unreasonable for users at all, 

> especially when programs like Logic and LIVE auto-saves the files 

One of the problem of that is if you want to make an autosave, you 

have to save the file with another name. As you can instantiate max 

patches as abstractions, this could lead to a lot of troubles. For 

instance, what would happen if the backup system would save the 

abstractions with new names? I would suggest using some strategies 

like Time Machine, cvs/svn if you're motivated ;-)

> Yes I know I know  :)   Save, save, and save... I just forgot while  
> writing my patch.   But then I just wondered since other commercial  
> programs, even Microsoft Word, would have a 'rescue' auto-save and  
> you can recover the file, which isn't unreasonable for users at all,  
> especially when programs like Logic and LIVE auto-saves the files  
> before the crash.

One of the problem of that is if you want to make an autosave, you  
have to save the file with another name. As you can instantiate max  
patches as abstractions, this could lead to a lot of troubles. For  
instance, what would happen if the backup system would save the  
abstractions with new names? I would suggest using some strategies  
like Time Machine, cvs/svn if you're motivated ;-)

Sorry to hear that. It seems, that Leopard (10.5) doesn't support this feature eventually... gives me one more reason to stick to Tiger (10.4)

You'll probably develop a kind of reflex, hitting apple-s unconciously whenever you made an important change to your patch.

You'll probably develop a kind of reflex, hitting apple-s unconciously whenever you made an important change to your patch.
One can get used to it!

"One of the problem of that is if you want to make an autosave, you

have to save the file with another name"...

That's what i personally found to be rather an advantadge before, especially when saving with a new name.

As you seem to be reporting, that Max doesn't have a backup system of it's own, why does max (both 4.6 and 5.05) here create a last-saved version right before a crash at all?

when my original patch was named "originalpatch", then the version saved during a crash has a name like "originalpatch73" or similar.

this - if undocumented - feature does help a lot, as it saved hours of work for me before.

the only "problem" that arises, is, that after a few crashes the folder containing the patch in question clutters up with all kinds of emergency-saved versions. but i can always find the most recent version by sorting the folder contents by date, if needed, and later save the newly opened emergency-saved patched under its original name.

"One of the problem of that is if you want to make an autosave, you
have to save the file with another name"...

That's what i personally found to be rather an advantadge before, especially when saving with a new name.
As you seem to be reporting, that Max doesn't have a backup system of it's own, why does max (both 4.6 and 5.05) here create a last-saved version right before a crash at all?

more exact:
when my original patch was named "originalpatch", then the version saved during a crash has a name like "originalpatch73" or  similar.
this - if undocumented - feature does help a lot, as it saved hours of work for me before.
the only "problem" that arises, is, that after a few crashes the folder containing the patch in question clutters up with all kinds of emergency-saved versions. but i can always find the most recent version by sorting the folder contents by date, if needed, and later save the newly opened emergency-saved patched under its original name.

On Nov 5, 2008, at 10:17 PM, Mari Kimura wrote:

> Please visit my NEW Blog: "Extended Violin Diary"

San Francisco, CA
Work: 857-544-3967
Email: bthrew (at) gmail (dot) com
Web: www.barrythrew.com

> When Max5 crashes for some reason, and your patch wasn't saved, is  
> there any way to recover it, such as what Logic or LIVE would do?   
> It seems like such a basic user interface....   I just lost 30  
> minutes of work!  :)
>
>
> ---------------
> http://www.marikimura.com
>
> Please visit my NEW Blog: "Extended Violin Diary"
> http://subharmonics.blogspot.com/
>
>
>

Quote: jayrope wrote on Thu, 06 November 2008 07:37

----------------------------------------------------

> It is possible, that Max saves a last version right before it crashes, into the same folder that your patch was stored before, under almost the same name, but with a 2 or 3-digit number attached to it. that's waht happens when max crashes here, and this already worked with mac 4.6 as well.

That never happened for me with 4.5-6 on Tiger or Leopard or with Max 5 on Leopard. Maybe I've just been unlucky :(

Quote: jayrope wrote on Thu, 06 November 2008 07:37
----------------------------------------------------
> Mari, when you're on a Mac:
> It is possible, that Max saves a last version right before it crashes, into the same folder that your patch was stored before, under almost the same name, but with a 2 or 3-digit number attached to it. that's waht happens when max crashes here, and this already worked with mac 4.6 as well.
> i am not sure that this would work on pc, i am on osx 10.4.11.
----------------------------------------------------

That never happened for me with 4.5-6 on Tiger or Leopard or with Max 5 on Leopard.  Maybe I've just been unlucky :(


Ouch. Pseudo-religious safe-savers with unconfirmed ex-existence are walking in to disturb the picture. Quickly get back to reading "the Wild Highway"!

> But then I just wondered since other commercial programs, even

> Microsoft Word, would have a 'rescue' auto-save and you can recover

> the file, which isn't unreasonable for users at all, especially when

> programs like Logic and LIVE auto-saves the files before the crash.

The reason is simple, in all these programs you usually work on a single

document. In Max you work on a lot of documents at the same time, this

poses a lot of logistic problems/thoughts. And a lot of changes are of

temporary nature, which you maybe don't want to be saved at all...

jayrope, what you describe never happened to me, maybe you had installed

Mari Kimura schrieb:
> But then I just wondered since other commercial programs, even
> Microsoft Word, would have a 'rescue' auto-save and you can recover
> the file, which isn't unreasonable for users at all, especially when
> programs like Logic and LIVE auto-saves the files before the crash.

The reason is simple, in all these programs you usually work on a single
document. In Max you work on a lot of documents at the same time, this
poses a lot of logistic problems/thoughts. And a lot of changes are of
temporary nature, which you maybe don't want to be saved at all...

jayrope, what you describe never happened to me, maybe you had installed
some extra tools?

-- 
Stefan Tiedje------------x-------
--_____-----------|--------------
--(_|_ ----|-----|-----()-------
-- _|_)----|-----()--------------
----------()--------www.ccmix.com

> jayrope, what you describe never happened to me, maybe you had 

possibly. my computer had developer tools for Tiger installed for instance. i don't know if that's related, though.

if it didn't break down two days ago i could run some checks on this, woudl be interestign to find out about a certain third-party application that max is benefitting from without c74 knowing about it.

> jayrope, what you describe never happened to me, maybe you had 
> installed some extra tools?

possibly. my computer had developer tools for Tiger installed for instance. i don't know if that's related, though.
if it didn't break down two days ago i could run some checks on this, woudl be interestign to find out about a certain third-party application that max is benefitting from without c74 knowing about it.

We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch. This feature has many other possible uses, such as permitting teachers to spy on their students' work habits!

The "feature" jayrope mentions is there to protect against losing your work when Max crashes *while* it is saving over an existing file. It first writes out our patch to a different filename, such as yourpatch-61, then once the file is completely written, it is renamed to have the original name. This feature won't help Mari, unfortunately.

We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch. 

Would this also work for new "Untitled" patches that you have not yet saved? I most often get burned when I start a new patch, and then get deeply enough into the design process to forget to save it before losing everything to a totally unanticipated (often interface-related) crash.

>
We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch. 
>

Would this also work for new "Untitled" patches that you have not yet saved? I most often get burned when I start a new patch, and then get deeply enough into the design process to forget to save it before losing everything to a totally unanticipated (often interface-related) crash. 

Quote: David Zicarelli wrote on Fri, 07 November 2008 13:38

> We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch. This feature has many other possible uses, such as permitting teachers to spy on their students' work habits!

David, would this saved undo history be part of the patch file or part of another file? If another file, would you be able to recreate the patch if the patch file is destroyed? I have become an obsessive saver so I do not need autosave for when I forget to, but a couple of times I have completely lost a patch due to file corruption caused by a crash.

Quote: David Zicarelli wrote on Fri, 07 November 2008 13:38
----------------------------------------------------
> We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch. This feature has many other possible uses, such as permitting teachers to spy on their students' work habits!
>

David, would this saved undo history be part of the patch file or part of another file?  If another file, would you be able to recreate the patch if the patch file is destroyed?  I have become an obsessive saver so I do not need autosave for when I forget to, but a couple of times I have completely lost a patch due to file corruption caused by a crash.


Am 07.11.2008 um 19:38 schrieb David Zicarelli:

> We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a 

> patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also 

> the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch.

> We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a  
> patch to file, which would help with recovering your work and also  
> the ability to undo past the last save and close of a patch.

Quote: David Zicarelli wrote on Fri, 07 November 2008 10:38

> We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file

This is really interesting, especially if the file format is consumable by end users (JSON maybe?).

I've been getting motivated to make some Max tutorials lately, but I don't like the "read this big document and follow along on your own" style of tutorials when Max has so much interactivity potential. I want to script building the patch as part of the tutorial, so as you read through the tutorial in [jweb] you get to see the patch being built.

I was thinking about trying to do this in JS but it seems like a lot of work. If I could somehow capture the undo history, start at the beginning and just redo all the commands, then it could be trivial to do what I want.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with what you are actually planning, but I thought it was a really neat idea and if there's any way it could be supported by undo history, that would be awesome! So I wanted to throw the idea out there.

Quote: David Zicarelli wrote on Fri, 07 November 2008 10:38
----------------------------------------------------
> We are looking at the possibility of writing the undo history of a patch to file

I'm sure this has nothing to do with what you are actually planning, but I thought it was a really neat idea and if there's any way it could be supported by undo history, that would be awesome! So I wanted to throw the idea out there.


Sequencing actions for tutorial purposes as well as the ability to recreate problems from sequences of user actions are two other applications of this idea. But as I said, we're only at the conceptual stage. No precise decisions about how it will work have been made yet. I just thought I'd mention what my thoughts are about this type of problem.

As to Eric's question, my guess is that there would be a single "untitled" undo history, so the moment you create a new document, you'd probably lose the history for the previously unsaved document.

Sequencing actions for tutorial purposes as well as the ability to recreate problems from sequences of user actions are two other applications of this idea. But as I said, we're only at the conceptual stage. No precise decisions about how it will work have been made yet. I just thought I'd mention what my thoughts are about this type of problem. 

I inquired about this about a month or two ago.

I'm wondering, why does having multiple files open pose a problem? It seems pretty logical to make an autosave that has something like '.backup' appended to the end of the name of the file, in the same folder as the file. This could easily work for multiple patches.

I'm pretty sure Max can tell what is a patcher file, and what is a subpatcher file, so that shouldn't be an issue.

As for abstractions, autosaving a copy as Untitled.backup should make it obvious to end-users that they should rename it - or just have max rename it to .maxpat upon trying to save it, at which point the finder will say 'That file already exists, would you like to replace it?'

People have suggested a small abstraction that links to a [thispatcher] which automatically saves your document - I actually really don't like that idea, entirely because it's overwriting my file, as opposed to actually saving a backup. What if I've made a change that causes a crash upon loading, and it gets autosaved to the actual document? I've had that happen and it's a HUGE pain to try and fix (involving opening the file in a text editor and fixing it by hand).

The only real problem I see with a 'real' autosave system is that some patches can get quite large, and may cause a stall while saving - having Max lock up every 5-10 minutes while it saves a backup would be annoying.

I'm wondering, why does having multiple files open pose a problem?  It seems pretty logical to make an autosave that has something like '.backup' appended to the end of the name of the file, in the same folder as the file. This could easily work for multiple patches.

People have suggested a small abstraction that links to a [thispatcher] which automatically saves your document - I actually really don't like that idea, entirely because it's overwriting my file, as opposed to actually saving a backup.  What if I've made a change that causes a crash upon loading, and it gets autosaved to the actual document? I've had that happen and it's a HUGE pain to try and fix (involving opening the file in a text editor and fixing it by hand).

The only real problem I see with a 'real' autosave system is that some patches can get quite large, and may cause a stall while saving - having Max lock up every 5-10 minutes while it saves a backup would be annoying.


this is lame. in this day and age all the software i use can rebuild a file from undo history. max shouldn't be an exception.

this is lame.  in this day and age all the software i use can rebuild a file from undo history.  max shouldn't be an exception.


I'd like to request that auto-backup be a feature, nowadays it's completely standard for any sort of professional software package to be able to backup your files at regular intervals. In my 3D graphics software (Cinema 4D) you can specify how many backups you want and how often it backs up and it'll backup to a folder in the installation directory without affecting the naming of your current file or any external references. And this is in a piece of software handling files that regularly become hundreds of MBs big.

Especially since one of the help patchers just crashed my Max..

Also many other programs offer the ability to recover your work when started up after a crash or give you an option to send an automatically compiled bug report.

Auto save, backup?