flows.xml is empty after forced (OS) restart

[dah]

Hi,

Yesterday I played around with the new overlay actions. I created a widget with one click action which should have closed the widget.

For some reason the overlay didn't respond to clicks and I had to restart my phone because there was no way to do anything (by holding the power button until the phone rebooted).

After the restart Automagic said something like "It seems something or someone has changed your flows.xml file [or properties of that file, or something similar]. Would you like to load the flows?". I said "yes". "After that AM said there was a problem and ask if I want to try again, move the file away or a third option.

I made a backup of flows.xml by hand and the choose "move".

There were no flows.

I went back to the AM folder and saw that the file size was zero (both, my backup and the new file).

There was a flow export file. The problem is it is from last November so there is missing a lot.

Another new feature that I've used is the ability to change the language of the UI (de to en).

So...

is there somewhere a automatically created backup of my flows.xml file? I couldn't find anything useful.

There were flows worth at least 20 to 30 hours. So it would be quite crappy if I just lost them...

[MURTUMA]

Sorry, I can't help you with your problem but here's something that might help you in future, of something similar happens.

http://automagic4android.com/flow.php?i ... f7d799717f

[Martin]

Hi,

Sorry, there's probably not much that can be done when the backup was not restored. Automagic only stores one backup internally which should be offered to be restored when the flow file get's corrupted. There should have been an option "Restore Backup" when the corrupt flow file was detected. There's no other way to restore a backup of the flows when you did not use the "Restore Backup" option.

There's a basic backup flow available in the catalog that stores the flows weekly on another location on your device. I highly recommend to customize the backup flow to periodically upload the flows to Dropbox or to send the flows as an attachment by mail so you can access the flows even when your device is lost.

Regards,
Martin

[dah]

Thanks, MURTUMA

@ Martin:

Wow, that sucks...

I didn't get an backup offered (at least not in an obvious way).

If you agree that something like this should never happen: Wouldn't it make sense to implement a more robust recovery mechanism? For example wouldn't it be much saver if there where more than one backup?

Implementing something like this shouldn't take more than one to three hours and it would have saved my flows.

It would be great if you could implement this (not for me, I have a backup flow now, but for other users).

[Martin]

"Restore backup" was the third option in the dialog that was shown.

I can totally understand that this sucks, I'm currently thinking about a more robust way to handle such cases. Sorry for the trouble.