Problem with drag and drop

Help & Support
1

Highly related to this old topic. " Problems with drag'n drop. " I have Opus version 9 and have re-discovered this bug, no doubt now fixed. Leo did a great job of replication, and correction in 2012. But in stumbling upon this old bug i lost a file that i was backing up so i would not lose it.

Not having done much with the win 7 32bit machine, so as to  preserve its contents, I am using another machine to now ask: "  How can i recover a .txt file that vanished during an aborted drag n drop ... "

 "Aborting the copy progress deletes the files irreversibly" was the summary in 2012. due to the [then] nature of 'copy,' which was actually more like move and then  replace, as opposed to some safer, quicker method that should have been attempted in case of unforeseen difficulty.

I would like to be shown  where i might look to find a cached copy of an aborted drag and drop file  that vanished upon clicking on 'replace', when offered 'cancel, skip or replace.'  I chose replace, because cancel seemed dangerous, skip seemed unlikely to make a copy, and replace sounded safe enough to leave me a copy of what i was copying.  But alas, it did not.   the file was removed from the left pane while i observed it disappearing.  It's NOT in the trash, not in either source or destination, and not in a 30 minute search and recovery program that finds accidentally deleted files. 

  I'm not too familiar with opus' workings but maybe it is known where such temp workings are kept.... surely the data is on my hard drive somewhere.  Its a one of a kind file, that i was copying for safety reasons as it will be very hard to make all over again from its  many sources.  I did, in the creation of it, do many 'saves' until it was build up quite nicely, and then only intended to duplicate it on another hd for safekeeping. It vanished in an instant with the press of one button with the mouse click.  Perhaps there is a history of "saves".   'control Z' has no long string of history, i tried that.

 I can be more specific as to the very precise circumstances at the time, for th0se willing to help me find this file.  It is a very reproducible event, as i went on to lose 5 more, short, inconcsequentiol files to make sure i was able to reproduce the conditions.  But i cannot find any sign of any of them...   Where to look?

thaniks in advance. dave in pennsylvania

2

If you abort a drag & drop that was moving files from one folder to another, you should not have any missing files. Those that had been moved so far should be in the destination, and those that had not yet been moved should still be in the source.

With a move, files do not get deleted from the source until they have been successfully copied to the destination.

3

Thanks Leo for the quick response.
i was not moving, i was copying, with a left click and drag to a different drive from the left to right pane. And i know they should not be missing. But they are! I just need to find some workaround to discover the files that vanished. One important file, and four tiny test files to reproduce and refine the problem.

please see your discussion earlier [with cyilmaz] on this similar issue. Jul of 2012

<<<< " leo
GPSoftware
Joined: 07 Nov 2004, 05:30
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
Opus: Directory Opus 11

Re: Problems with drag'n drop

Post23 Jul 2012, 14:51
Okay, that should all be fixed when 10.1.0.1 is released, after the work I've done on it today.

Opus was treating drops from the folder-tree, below the temp folder, as if they were temp-files dropped from other programs, which it handles differently to normal drops.
(That is also why it deleted the files at the end, even if not successful. ...... .
As a general note, it may not be a good idea to use the temp folder as your own working folder, as there are assumptions made about the kind of data in there...... >>>>> "

"Thanks for yours [alert] as well, the videos and details were very helpful in tracking this down, and we may not have realised (sic) it was a problem otherwise! "

This problem is NOT occurring only with temp folder work, as in your 2012 example, but it is occurring whenever the copy is, for some reason, aborted. (in version 9 or perhaps others)... In my case the reason was an improper connection to a network shared drive. If it were only that it might fail to copy, all would be forgiven, but with the disappearance of the original file it is something to worry about. I can no longer use this version again and will certainly move to 11 or so, in order to trust opus with a copy operation.
BUT, HOW MIGHT I FIND THIS FILE? ... some internal working knowledge of OPUS is required here. I used many 'saves' in construction of this text file over the hours of its creation. But lost it (on two HD's) in the final copy to a backup HardDrive.

thanks Leo for joining my thread, even tho i see it is in the wrong area of the forum.
dave in pennsylvania

4

I can't think of any reason why a file could disappear that was being copied, outside of that very old case with the temp folder (where it was really being moved; and even then, it would exist in the destination if it had been moved out of the source).

I don't know what's happening on your machine but it sounds very strange.

Could it be that the files are actually still there, but being hidden in some way?

5

i am able to reproduce the error, and have made a screen shot video of the occurrence. It only occurs when there is an 'abort' error box present. And this occurs when there is a network share error. This is where my system is at fault. Its an insidious error that i haven't tracked down yet. I get it rarely. But when i do I must move on to a copy sequence that does work. [workaround]
BUT, herein lies the interesting part, ... Once that error box rears its head, there is no saving the file. 'Abort' is what creates this opus vanishing bug.,.. very visible in the video. I only thought you might be interested, for opus' sake. Maybe fixed in version ten and eleven, but i can't afford those to find out. I must however abandon my version 9, as it cannot be trusted. And i haven't found a way to unhide, unerase, or hex edit the junk from a harddrive's trash to find my important file -- lost in the discovery of this vanishing bug. Cyilmaz said it best, when he said in --> Problems with drag'n drop
Post22 Jul 2012, 11:07
"And one more thing! Aborting the copy progress deletes the files irreversibly, as in the original problem [2007]. This disturbs me even more ..." cyilmaz

leo
GPSoftware
Re: Problems with drag'n drop
Post23 Jul 2012, 14:51
Okay, that should all be fixed when 10.1.0.1 is released, ...

now, how to send the video i've made for your inspection

6

You can put the video on YouTube or similar, or email it to leo@gpsoft.com.au

I still cannot see any way that a copy could do anything to the source files, unless something external is happening as part of losing the network connection, like a device failure which is causing data loss.

7

videos of screen during 'vanishing bug while copying file with drag and drop' opus v 9 in 2016

getting an invalid file extention [.avi] when sending file of screen shots during copy process

youtu.be/SGgCt0vNR1A trying youtube upload to this link

8

In the video, it looks like you are copying the file over itself.

The source file is in a folder on the local C:\ drive.

You're dragging it to a destination which is exactly the same folder, but via a UNC path.

Presumably the machine name you double-click on near the start of the video is the name of the machine you are on, not a second machine.

That's why the file already exists at the start, and why the Replace File dialog shows it has identical size and date to the one you are dragging. It is the same file.

If you choose to replace it, the destination file is deleted and the source file is then copied over it. Except the source and destination files are the same file, so the source file is no longer there to copy.

Opus does detect source = destination in some situations, but there are many different ways you can have two completely different paths that ultimately point to the same folder (not just UNC shares but multiple levels of junctions & links on top of that, some of which may be applied on the remote server and be impossible to inspect from the client side), so it's not possible to detect it all the time.

Long story short: The underlying problem is you're doing something that inherently does not make sense and will confuse most software: Copying a file over itself via two different paths that, behind the scenes, point to the same directory.

9

We've put a change into 12.0.3 Beta which will block the Replace/Delete operation when doing what you were doing.

10

Thanks Leo for that thorough look at my video, and the rigorous explanation of just what you were seeing of my problem with drop and drag copying. Thanks also for making a correction in the ongoing update and improvement of Opus 12 that will prevent data loss for someone else who finds himself copying a file onto itself across View Panes.
In my defense i must add that [in my video] i knew i was copying onto a network mirror of itself. That was the quickest way i could guarantee getting an example of the problem into a short enough screen-video to email. The real-world problem did not involve that particular scenario [of 'replace the file' and 'access is denied' combination] but instead some 'similar' situation where the two decision boxes came about in that same order but in a much too difficult atmosphere to reproduce.

      " Presumably the machine name you double-click on near the start of the video
                 is the name of the machine you are on, not a second machine. "

Indeed, I had a network error inherently waiting. Then lost an important file on the source hd without its going to [any] destination.

In short, ...

 I am happy to have contributed to the newest version of Opus, with my two videos, but am still hoping to discover a place to recover  my 3mb txt file on the source hard drive.  
Are you able to duplicate my [albeit nonsensical] scenario to find where such a [tesst] file resides on YOUR harddrive,  in any opus version?  Is there a file cache anywhere within opus for ''replace' or 'access denied'  consequences, intended or unintended?

That additional bit of investigation work, since you know Opus so well, and a beta copy of Opus 12, or similar, [for a test in MY real-world], would be  a welcome outcome to our thread.

dave in Pennsylvania, USA

11

If you were copying the file over itself somehow then the file would have been deleted when Replace was clicked. An undelete tool like Recuva is te best bet, but went always be able to find the data still there.