FG crashed when renaming a directory, all recent changes lost

[Rades]

I was working on my 5E campaign today and renamed a directory in my Items, something like "Official Magic Items" to "Official D&D Magic Items". FG froze and crashed, and when I started it back up, it had completely wiped out my db.xml file - it was as if I was starting a new campaign. Unfortunately I didn't think to record the error I got when loading up the campaign. Something about an error reading line 0 or something.

Now, I still have my old db.backup files, so I do have everything before my work today. But this is still a few hours of work just gone completely. Is there any way to ensure that a crash doesn't erase everything, other than frequently exiting FG (so it saves the db file) and then backing up the db file manually? I hate being scared to even work on my game being paranoid to even touch anything without it all just vanishing again.

I realize there's maybe nothing else to be done except the above, I'm just incredibly annoyed/frustrated and hoping there's a better backup system I am not aware of.

[Moon Wizard]

The db.session.*.xml files keep a copy of the last session loaded once each day per campaign.

(The db.backup.*.xml files are actually only created when requested by the ruleset; so these should not be used unless the ruleset developer suggests as they could be much older.)

I'm not aware of any specific failures to do with renaming groups; but I'll try that exact renaming on my test campaign to see if I see any issues.

Regards,
JPG

[Rades]

I'm pretty sure the crash on rename group was a fluke thing...I've definitely renamed groups before without incident, though that little bit of performance hit whenever I do it as FG works does always give me a fright. Maybe there were just so many items affected by the change it caused the crash. If you discover any direct cause I'd love to know, but otherwise I think I'll just try to manually backup the db.xml file frequently when working, since that's the file that got wiped clean in the crash.

Good to know about the differences between the session/backup xml files though!

[Nylanfs]

I wonder if it was the & since it's a special character?

[Rades]

Update, I was able to recreate this crash problem (this time with careful backups first) - it was a memory error. Same situation, renaming an item group from Official Magic Items to [Magic Items] D&D Official Items, and after a long board freeze, eventually got a crash with "Script Error: not enough memory" and "Runtime Error: Exception: bad allocation". There are a lot of items in this group (6 pages' worth), but after I closed some other programs I had running and tried again, it worked just fine. (Nylanfs, I wondered if the & was the problem, but then it worked perfectly the second try.)

I'm not sure what it is about renaming groups that not only requires a lot of memory but also potentially fatally corrupts the db.xml if the board crashes during the process (this happened to me once before months ago, but I didn't lose much so I didn't post on the forums about it), but I guess just a PSA to be careful when renaming groups!

[Moon Wizard]

Yeah, out of memory errors would cause all sorts of random issues. I'm not sure of the exact memory profile of how renaming categories would work; but it could be the large data set as you mentioned.

If closing applications worked, that seems to imply that FG ran out of shared physical memory before reaching application memory limit. This can be exaggerated if you have limited memory on your machine (4GB or less) or running an older version of Windows. The memory limit for FGC ranges from 1.7GB to 3.3GB, depending on specs.

If you're bumping up against that limit, try unloading other modules as well, or trimming images/tokens folders.

Regards,
JPG