db.xml BLANK

[corda911]

hey i've been building a campaign of late and today after closing the program to go out for a bit, when i came back i recieved an error of:

Error while loading campaign database.

a XML parse error occurred processing file db.xml - Error on line 0: Error document empty.

backup of original database file saved to: (such and such).

so i looked at some forum posts and felt confident to check out the db files. i had two backups at this point. so i looked at the first backup and set it as the primary db. and the campaign loaded but was unfortunately missing my days work. when i tried the second backup i got the error again. so i looked at all the db's with notepad ++ and to my surprise the backup that seems the most recent is blank. that is to say it is full of lines( several pages) but there is no actual writing it was just MILLIONS of spaces.... i have lost a tonne of work and am looking for a hopeful solution though i think in vain. i have all the backups still.

[damned]

corda911 it doesnt sound good re: todays work...
what is the path to your campaign data?
if you are doing a lot of prep work I think it is advisable to make a manual backup every hour or so just in case... I go into explorer and zip up the campaign folder and add a timestamp to the name eg HeoesOfHaldan.20150715.1930.zip

[corda911]

i have it stored in my d drive (my primary storage drive) d:/fantasygrounds/campaigns etc
being a new comer to the software it didn't occur to me to worry about it. you can bet your butt it's now set to auto backup every hour.
p.s. c drive is my ssd, d drive is my hdd and f drive is my external DAS.

[kylania]

I had a similar issue last night. 3.1.1 at work where I started working on a campaign. Moved it home where I had some funky 3.1.2 "live" install. (I upgraded to 3.1.2, tried to downgrade and it didn't...) First time opening and working everything was fine. Then it would keep crashing FG when I Loaded the campaign again and make that backup, but everything would be fine in the campaign.

I deleted FantasyGrounds.exe and updated fresh and everything worked as expected after that, no more xml backups.

[Nylanfs]

Also as a note do NOT use a synced cloud folder location (Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive etc.) to store your active campaign. Always copy out of and into this location while FG isn't running. There's a chance that if FG's database is being updated as the folder is being synced it could corrupt it.