Lost Flashcards

[freshcat]

Hi,

I generally love PlecoDict - great product, fair price. If only it wouldn't crash so often (I admit: PocketPC Windows Mobile 5)... Until now I haven't cared too much, my iPAQ reboots quickly. Now however I have seemingly lost all my Flashcards, i.e. whenever I start PlecoDict there are only about 15 (out of originally about 350) entries left. However there is still a file PlecoDict Flashcards.PEB which is 32 kB of size (somewhat too large for 15 entries), so I believe that this file has been corrupted.

Is there any way of restoring my orginal entries? And for the future: are there any means of turning PlecoDict more stable? My PPC is an elder model and I had to install it on a memory card (fonts in memory).

Thanks a lot,
Christian

 

[mikelove]

This definitely sounds like some file corruption, yes. If you e-mail us the flashcard file there's a small chance that we might be able to recover the data, but unfortunately most of the time in cases like this there's not much we can do.

As far as what we're doing in future releases, in 2.0 we're completely replacing the parts of PlecoDict for Pocket PC that are responsible for most of its stability problems, namely the font system (we're switching from the built-in and memory-card-unfriendly Microsoft one to a more reliable open-source one called FreeType) and the flashcards / user dictionary database system (switching from our proprietary PEB format to an open-source database called SQLite). The SQLite switch should make file corruption a thing of the past - it's very stable, and it's designed in such a way that even if a small segment of the file gets corrupted most of the data will still be intact and recoverable.

In the meantime, the best way to prevent against file corruption / deletion is to back up your data files regularly; connect your Pocket PC to your desktop, open up My Computer and Mobile Device and you can easily copy the flashcard/user dictionary files from there to a safe location on your desktop's hard drive.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Yeah, I have almost the same problem. Last week while I was creating new user dictionary entries on my iPAQ Pocket PC my user dictionary database became corrupted. I lost about 200 user created dictionary entries. Arrrggghhh!

And, I also usually have to do a soft reset at least once a day (sometimes more) when using PlecoDict because of the instability issues.

I can't wait until PlecoDict 2.0 comes out. Not only do I check the PlecoDict forums page and the 2.0 Preview page daily in anticipation of the announcement of 2.0, but I also regularly check HP's site in hopes that an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.0 will be coming out soon.

As for the user dictionary being corrupted, I already deleted the file, so I am out of luck. I guess from now on I will back it up daily. I can't wait until PlecoDict will be automatically synching these files with our computers for backup purposes!

 

[mikelove]

Yikes. That's rather more instability than normal - are you running any weird beta software like sfrrr or is it just PlecoDict and one or two other relatively-innocuous programs? Did you install the font files in main memory or on a memory expansion card? They should always go in main memory, which is why the installer puts them there - if they're moved to an expansion card they can cause lots and lots of instability issues. Are you running CE-Star or Monster Chinese or another Chinese enabler system like those?

You don't really need to check the site every day, though, we are planning to give people a *little* advance notice before the first beta - I'll probably put a quick note up somewhere when we think we've got about a week or so to go (i.e., it's basically ready and we're just revising documentation / installing it on a dozen different PDAs for compatibility testing / etc). Which is still a while away, I'm afraid - the new SQLite database which is going to make things so much better on Pocket PC is taking way longer than expected to get working reliably on Palm, thanks mainly to some very silly bugs in the Palm OS ARM libraries. But next week I should be posting some screenshots of the new flashcard system here, which might help make the waiting a tiny bit less painful at least (or more, depending on your perspective).

 

[hairyleprechaun]

As always, it was good to get another update on 2.0.

I do have the sim sum font in the main memory ( I moved it into the Windows/Font folder a long time ago.)

As for programs, probably the least stable one I am running is the CE Star Chinese localizer. It also tends to be a little unstable, though I keep it updated, and it is tending towards being more stable with the updates that Mobem seems to be putting out more regularly these days. I need the program for its handwriting recognizer so that I can write Chinese and Japanese in my other programs. Do you have a better/more stable suggestion for a Chinese/Japanese handwriting recognizer to put on my pocket PC? I remember originally trying to install Moster Chinese, but never managed to get it to work though that was about a year and a half ago now. And recently I took a look at the Decuma Handwriting Recognition http://www.zicorp.com/HandwritingRecognition.htm which has a Japanese and a Chinese recognizer (apparently it can't be used to recognize both character sets?, without having both of them?) but I cannot seem to find a link for purchasing it. I guess they are not licensing it to individuals.?

 

[freshcat]

Thank you

Sending in the corrupted flash card file, the Pleco folks (a.k.a. Michael) could really restore it (and save my day).

Thank you so much,
Christian

 

[Sarevok]

I got a similar problem now, I was messing around with my cards today (mostly merging lists and deleting some lists). I made a backup of my "PlecoDict Flashcards.peb" and later (things didn't go so well with merging two large lists) tried to restore it, but without much success. When I delete the corrupted list and try to copy that backup file to My Documents folder Pleco always makes a new clean flashcard list with filenames like "PlecoDict Flashcards--1028121911.peb" or "PlecoDict Flashcards--1028120001.peb" etc. and uses that one instead. I checked the dates, my backup file was last saved at exactly 17:00, when I copy it to my PDA it retains the date until I start Pleco, then the date is updated (so Pleco obviously somehow changes the file) and the new clean file generated... Is it that my backup file got somehow corrupted as well? And more importantly, is there some way to restore it? I would rather not throw my 3000+ words away, lose the statistics and whatsoever...

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... did you back up the file while PlecoDict was running? It shouldn't matter, but if there's some sort of rare bug where part of the file isn't getting written out correctly until PlecoDict exits that would explain a lot.

Anyway, the first thing I'd suggest is that you exit PlecoDict completely using the Quit command in the Dict menu, soft reset your Pocket PC, copy all of the .peb files from My Documents back over to your regular PC and delete them from your Pocket PC, then copy just that backed-up Flashcards file to your Pocket PC and reopen PlecoDict.

If that doesn't help matters, send us all of those .peb files (including the backed-up one) and we'll see if there's anything we can do to restore them.

 

[sfrrr]

Since I've lost hundreds of flash cards over the last few years, I've stopped using PD's flash card applet, much to Mike's relief, I think. But, like the techie fool that I am, when 2.0 comes out, I'll jump back into making flash cccrds. And I can't wait. My advice is to make a backup every day at the least. If I were heavily using them, I'd back up at least twice a day.

Sandra

 

[Sarevok]

I experimented a bit more today and it must definitely be some kind of rare bug rather than a mistake on my part. I copied the file to the memory card (which might be well considered a mistake, but I was nowhere near my laptop at that time) and it got corrupted somehow (every single part of Pleco is installed in the main memory and it was not running at that time). Yesterday I thought that I might accidentally copied the corrupted file over the backed-up one, but it is not so. Today I repeated the exact same process with another flashcard file (backed-up on my harddisk some month ago) and it got corrupted in the same way... might be just my machine, I don't know. Not that this knowledge would help matters anyhow I just have to backup more often (and maybe even more often than that )

 

[mikelove]

That's odd, I was actually looking through the (already-discarded-for-2.0) database file writing code today and it really does look to be impossible for anything to be partially written out; pretty much every time you do anything involving a file write the data is immediately flushed to disk. But nonetheless this seems like clear evidence that you should exit PlecoDict completely before backing up or otherwise moving around any of its data files.

Anyway, along with the brand new not-written-by-us SQLite database we're also going to be read-protecting data files in Pleco 2.0, so it will be impossible copy any Pleco-related data file while the software is running.