Timeline file cleared upon opening?!

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Timeline file cleared upon opening?!

Postby ABPerson » 22 May 2023, 14:45

Hi,
Apologies if this comes off as a little harsh, I don't necessarily intend for it to be in the slightest. I hope someone here might have a suggestion and perhaps this could even make it to the devs and be resolved to, you know, never happen again. I do quite like various aspects of ShowXPress, and it's great that it's free for what it can do.

I was working on a show, which is split across multiple timeline files for different sections. I went to open one of these timeline files (I wasn't even planning on editing it, I just wanted to showcase something to someone), and I distinctly remember glancing at the file size before I did, it was a nice 76KB. All good, so I went to open it up in the software... And when it opened, I waited a few seconds and was met with... Nothing. The timeline was completely blank. Timeline names gone, everything.

OK, that's a bit strange, but I thought no big deal, maybe there's a bug with opening and it just can't handle, I don't know, the few hundred events (it does take a few minutes to save once you've got a few hundred events after all, which... Is a different matter). Or, perhaps the file is somehow corrupt somewhere along the way. Either way, that's no big deal, those are both fixable, especially thanks to these files all being text-readable (which, credit where credit is due, is a really nice idea, I do appreciate the "openness" ShowXPress expels), at least some of the data will be there for me to poke around with. So I went over to the files to figure out what exactly was going on here. And then I realized... The file... Has been overwritten... And is now 1KB. I opened it up in a text editor, and there's nothing in there at all besides the boilerplate setup of the default timelines... Wh- What?! I didn't save it (not that I recall), I literally just opened it up, and that simple action overwrote all of it?! W- Why?!?!

I have a backup of this file from a few days ago (because I mean, c'mon, what exactly is gonna happen to it, I didn't think there'd be a need to backup every single hour), but even a few days of hard work on the time crunch I'm on here is utterly ridiculous. For no explanation at all. Is there any possibility ShowXPress makes a backup of timeline files that it, I presume, "fails to open" into some AppData or log or something, before it goes unexplainably and without request overwriting them, or otherwise?

Thanks, I'm praying someone has a potential solution here. As I say, I can barely afford to be suffering from issues like this right now. I still greatly appreciate ShowXPress for everything it's doing for me, and I do appreciate the hard work behind the project!
ABPerson
 
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Re: Timeline file cleared upon opening?!

Postby support » 23 May 2023, 07:52

The timeline project is here: /home_directory/lightshows/YourLightshow/Live/TimeLine/
You can edit the .tml file with a notepad to check its content.
If it is empty, you can try to replace only this file with the one from your latest backup.
We do not have any other solution ; sorry for that.
The Lighting Controller
support
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