Collection Contents Disappearing

Greetings Gurus,

Long time Opus user here. The bottom line:

32bit Opus arbitrarily deletes the contents of Collections (Opus Virtual folder Collections).

The first time It occured I thought I had inadvertently deleted it myself so I repopulated the collection and now it's empty again.

This is a definite confirmed bug.

Deletes the actual files, or just "forgets" that the files are meant to be in the collections?

If a file in a collection is deleted and Opus notices, Opus will remove the file from the collection. If a new version of the file is then created, it will not be added back to the collection (unless it all happens very quickly, like some programs do when saving new versions of files).

If the collection is used for Find Results, the Find tool will (unless you tell it otherwise) overwrite the set of results with the new results when you run a new Find.

I think Opus may also verify that files in collections still exist when it starts up, and remove any missing files from the collections they were in.

If it's any of those things then it's by-design and not a bug.

The files are not deleted from the disk, just from the collection.
What's strange is that other collections are intact.

Did anything modify the files?

Sometimes files are modified by deleting the old file and then replacing it with a new one. Opus tries to detect that and treat the new file as a new version of the old file, but sometimes it just looks like the old file was deleted and is gone (e.g. if there is a long enough delay between the old file being deleted and the replacement file being created).

No modification.

What kind of files were they?

How were they added to the collection?

Are they on a device which is always there, or one which isn't, like a USB drive or network share?

What is the collection used for? What sort of tasks/operations are performed on or with it?

Did the files get removed from the collection after a restart or while things were running?

I have the collections on a button ( I have MANY buttons with this format and they have been working perfectly for a long time)
The button is set up so I can add to the collection by dragging files/folders onto the button.
The contents of the collection are exe's, lnk's, various files and folders that are still at the location they were when I added them to the collection.
For instance I open the Microsoft Office folder on the start menu and drag all the links to office programs into the collection.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<button 3dborders="no" backcol="#000000" display="icon" min_width="yes" popout="bottom" textcol="#800080" type="menu">
TOOLS
TOOLS
%Ancient%\Iconic\PNG Bar\master.png,0
%Ancient%\Iconic\PNG Bar\Master pressed.png,0

@runmode:hide


• PowerNET
• PowerNET
%Ancient%\Iconic\PNG Bar_divider.png,0

go "coll://PowerNET"



coll://PowerNET
coll://PowerNET
%Ancient%\Iconic\PNG Bar#newbuttonmenu,0

go "coll://PowerNET" foldercontent


hat kind of files were they?

How were they added to the collection? drag n drop

Are they on a device which is always there, or one which isn't, like a USB drive or network share? Local HD

What is the collection used for? What sort of tasks/operations are performed on or with it? Launching apps

Did the files get removed from the collection after a restart or while things were running? Restart

Thanks for the details.

I agree, it seems unlikely that those files would have changed, unless it was due to a Windows Update patch or similar. (Which would be unlikely to affect everything in your collections.)

The only thing I can think of is that Opus was unable to write the new collection list to disk so the collection got lost. e.g. Opus saves changes to collections in batches, after a timeout, rather than as soon as the collections are modified. (That's done to reduce the number of times it re-writes the collection when it is being modified repeatedly.) And if the collection hasn't been saved yet when Opus exits then Opus has to save it then, of course. If the computer gets turned off during shutdown (or dopus.exe gets killed while writing the files) then the files may not be completely saved. Some people had that problem with toolbar files due to killing power to their PCs before they had fully shut-down, for example.