Subject: Re: MS Word does NOT do this!
From: Tim LaDuca (mail@timl.org)
Date: Tue Aug 08 2000 - 23:14:30 CDT
sam th wrote:
>
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> On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>
> > >What happens is that the kernal detects that a program is attempting
> > >to access a region of memory it is not allowed to. It sends a signal to
> > >the running application informing the application of this problem. Now
> > >this is a very bad thing for the application to be doing and means
> > >something has gone gone horribally wrong somewhere. Abi intercepts this
> > >signal and attempts to save the file. If abi has not become too corrupted
> > >this works.
> >
> > When it does this, does it make sure NOT to overwrite any existing file? If it
> > overwrites a file when crashing, it may well write garbage to it and trash the
> > file.
> >
>
> The backup code writes the file CURRENT_FILE.bak (where current file is
> replaced by the current file name). So if that already exists, it will
> overwrite it. If people have better suggestions for this, I am open to
> them.
Seems like a swell policy to me. For a document that has a user-given
name it won't overwrite the previously saved document, and for a yet
named document it, at worst, will overwrite a previously recovered file.
Even if two documents that have not been given a name yet by the user
both crash, they would presumably have diffrent filenames(untitled-1,
untitled-2). However I could see someone renaming a backup copy of a
*.abw file to *.bak, in which case the backup file could be lost.
Perhaps a different extension is in order, e.g. *.sav, *.dmp, *.abw.sav,
or some combination thereof.
Regards,
TimL
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