File saving instability
The last couple of days I have been running into the file saving lockups previously reported. I'm running 2012 (825) under Windows. Both times MD has locked up, I've had to kill the application using the task manager. The most recent time I lost the previous hour of data entry I'd done. I have no idea why the 5 minute autosave didn't contain the data, but it didn't.
So I figure to minimize the problem, I'll manually save the file every so often. Surprise, there is no longer a Save menu item. Why would you remove this? So I either have to exit and reenter the program if I want to force a save, or do a Save As and start tracking which file is the most recent, which is risky at best.
The worst type of problem an application like this can have is to lose or corrupt data. The lockup bug looks like it's been open for at least a month now. I've been very impressed by the responsiveness of the support and programming staff in the past, but this bug has been around too long. It should be getting top priority, if it isn't already.
And in any case, there should be a simple way to manually save one's data. It's unacceptable not to have that kind of control. Please but in a facility for this. Losing data is unacceptable.
-Jerry
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1 Posted by Scott Meehan on Nov 22, 2012 @ 02:12 PM
Hi Jerry,
I'm sorry to hear about the data loss! I certainly understand that not losing or corrupting data is of tantamount importance with financial software, so we do consider it to be a serious and top priority issue. This bug is being addressed, along with some other ones, and will be included in the next release of Moneydance which is currently being internally beta tested and will hopefully be released soon.
Sorry for the inconvenience and please let us know if we can be of further assistance!
Scott Meehan
Moneydance Support
2 Posted by jerrymr on Dec 01, 2012 @ 03:09 PM
I downloaded 2012.2 (841), and while it's too soon to say whether the lockup bug is better, the autosaving every time there is any data change makes MD rather unusable.
My data file is about 64 megabytes, and every time it saves, the program freezes for about 4 seconds. If I'm entering or modifying multiple transactions, have a 4 second freeze between each one is rather bad.
Is there any way to perform the save on a thread other than the user interface thread?
-Jerry
3 Posted by jerrymr on Dec 01, 2012 @ 03:12 PM
I should also mention I'm running under Windows 7 SP1 64 bit, 8GB ram, 3.4 GHz Xeon.
-Jerry
4 Posted by Scott Meehan on Dec 01, 2012 @ 03:18 PM
Hi Jerry,
Can you try downloading the 842 preview release and see if that improves the response time from the autosaving? It's replaced the 841 preview, here:
http://infinitekind.com/preview
Scott Meehan
Moneydance Support
5 Posted by jerrymr on Dec 06, 2012 @ 05:11 AM
Scott, with the 942 release, two to six seconds pass after a modification is entered before the "Saving file" message appears, and the save itself lasts about three seconds ("Save completed successfully"). Still not usable.
This autosaving behavior is a big mistake. If it is not possible to autosave without disabling the user interface while it is happening, there needs to be a preferences option to either disable it or set the interval at which it occurs (perhaps allow the user to set how many transaction modifications between saves?). The old behavior of manual saving was perfectly fine for me - why would you take this away?
-Jerry
6 Posted by -Kevin N. on Dec 06, 2012 @ 02:35 PM
Hi Jerry,
I'll tell you why they took it away but you're not going to believe it.
Manual saving can cause data loss between the i-app and the desktop.
You can read more about it in this blog entry:
http://infinitekind.com/blog/archives/601/
They've designed the functionality of the desktop program around the functionality of the free smart phone app!
I can not for the life of me figure out why the developers have taken Moneydance off on this tangent. First of all, not everyone uses the i-app. Hell I don't even understand why anyone needs to input data into a PFM while they're out shopping.
If it's because you're up against your credit limit or your about to hit the NSF limit then it's certainly arguable that you have no business owning a $500 smart phone or the expensive service that goes along with it.
I'm sticking with MD 2011 because of it's ability to manual save and maybe more importantly, it's ability to NOT save the changes.
If I want incremental saves, I might as well go back to using Microsoft Money. At least with MS Money, I get accurate investment reporting.
If you want to revert back to MD 2011, you can download the installation file for 803 here:
http://moneydance.com/other
or 808 here:
http://moneydance.com/preview/
-Kevin N.
7 Posted by Jon Hoover on Dec 06, 2012 @ 06:40 PM
Hi,
Autosaving prevents errors with iPhone syncing but once we implement the integrated dropbox syncing it will protect against errors in that too. The latter is a cross-platform issue, especially since dropbox users tend to be some of the most likely to be using multiple platforms.
We had the autosaving initially happen in the background so you could do work concurrently and the program wouldn't freeze for a moment, but this started causing other errors. So we just switched it to the foreground but have discovered that on certain setups the pause to save was too long. We will be switching it back to the background. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Sincerely,
Jon Hoover, Moneydance Support
System closed this discussion on Mar 31, 2015 @ 03:54 PM.