Project looses its files

[heel]

Suddenly after reopening of the project, many of the files in the project have disappeared. The files are still on the disk. Some files were in project virtual folders and some in auto populated folders. All the auto populated are turned to virtual folders and are empty, but retained the name they had. There are no error messages when loading the project.

It has happened a couple of times now and is pretty annoying.

Seen this before?

I have compared the broken project file with a previous working version, and there are huge differences. It has lost about 30k out of 113k.

[Matthew_Kelton]

Have you been moving files around outside of the project, or are the auto-populating folders network shares that may be missing sometimes if the network is unreachable?  Are you working on multiple machines that may not have the same directory structure?

LabVIEW will usually do this if an auto-populating folder is no longer found where it is expected to be.

[heel]

Thanks for taking time to answer my question. 

1. It is files on a network share.
2. I do occasionally access from different computers, but the network share path is the same on all.
3. In this case, I just closed the working project and reopened and the files were gone. A bit worrying that it did not give any error messages while opening the project. I am confident that the project file as such is not corrupted by the file system - that would be very unusual at least, so LabVIEW ought to report if there is a mismatch between what it expects and what it finds - at least that I would expect.
4. It is not clear however if the files are being removed from the project during save and exit or during load. Fact is that, once I see they are gone, I don't save anything, exit and reopen. Yet to no avail - they are gone next time I open. This suggests that it is during exit the damage is done.

[Bozhidar]

Hello Heel,

Which version of LabVIEW are you using? This is a known issue with LabVIEW 2012 and it should be fixed with 2013.

Best,
Bozhidar

[heel]

Hi Bozhidar,

Sorry, should have mentioned that, but it is LV2015 and 64bit version - so brand new.

[Bob_Schor]

Are you using any "containers", such as Classes or Project Libraries (.lvlib)?  Funny things can happen.  You also didn't answer the question of whether, once your Project was created, you moved any files around on disk outside of LabVIEW (i.e. using Windows Explorer).  Also, what is the general structure of the files on disk?  Is everything in the Project inside a single "top-level" folder, with possibly sub-folders "underneath" it?  Are all of the VIs (and controls and other LabVIEW "things", e.g. Libraries) contained somewhere within this Top Level Folder?

Do you really need to use LabVIEW 64-bit?  I'm a little nervous about it, myself ...

Bob Schor

[heel]

All custom files are inside one directory with sub directories for special functions to keep things nice and tidy. But of course all vi lib and add-on's (VIPM) are in the installation directory. There are no classes. It does use lvlib's.

It has happened once (LV2014) when moving the entire project structure from server drive to local disk. With LV2015 It came without no reason - or at least so it looked. I have not moved files from outside the project, except as I mentioned I moved the entire project. This I have done many times without problem. This is the same as what you do when having your project under source revision control - you checkin/out in different folders. This must work.

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce this error and it is rare - so I have no idea how to do debugging. There must be some error's inside LV which are not properly handled or reported when the project file suddenly can loose so much data and still being "valid".

I need LV 64bit due to memory requirements - vision app.

[edjones93]

Hello,

I am Ed at National Instruments Technical Support. I am happy to assist you with your query.

I have attempted to replicate the error however have not been able to do so as of yet, even after changing the location of the project on disk outside of LabVIEW, using Windows Explorer.

In a previous case errors such as these were a result of other processes on the server hosting the network folder, interacting with the files. It may be prudent to monitor the files for a period of time with a file monitoring application to check that this is not causing your issue also.

There are certain file monitoring utilities specific to network files, you should be able to find such utilities in google, but please be aware as to the source of such executables. Also recording the file I/O monitored by such a utility when this does occur and when this does in not, when opening the project in LabVIEW to check for differences in the processing of files by LabVIEW itself.

I hope that this is helpful, I will continue to research into the subject and attempt to replicate the issue in the office.

Best regards,

Ed

[heel]

Hello Ed,

Thanks for looking into this. As I said it has only happened a couple of times.

But explain me:  I suppose that in the project file are links which describe which files and where they are and also what type of folder files arein, in the project. If we assume that something is messing with the files corrupting the integrity of the project, then I do not understand how LabVIEW silently can accept this and not report an error. Because what I see is that the auto-populating folders are just empty - in fact they were converted to normal virtual folders but empty, yet the file structure is intact on disk when I look. This does not prove that there has'nt been a transient where those files were gone, but my point is: If Project is missing files, then LabVIEW should not just assume this is the correct state and default to something else. Or that's what I would expect at least.

thanks

[Matthew_Kelton]

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@heel wrote:

If Project is missing files, then LabVIEW should not just assume this is the correct state and default to something else.

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But this is what auto-populating folders are supposed to be.  If files are added, they are automatically added to the project.  If they are deleted, they are automatically removed.  If LabVIEW determines the files are missing, it automatically removes them.  Now, perhaps LabVIEW should throw an error/warning if the top-level autopopulating folder disappears, but I don't want to be nagged by messages when a file goes missing in an autopopulated folder.

If you want these warnings, don't use the autopopulating, and LabVIEW will show warnings for missing files.