On Friday 07 September 2007, walt wrote: > On Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:50:19 +0100, Dave wrote: > > I had a system crash the other day, (USB scanner locked up and > > unplugging it/re-plugging it killed FreeBSD 5.5) > > > > Pan0.127 was open at the time. When I restarted everything, Pan had > > resorted to it's default settings for more or less everthing. Pane > > layout, no groups subscribed (not even the list of groups on the > > servers), profiles gone Bah! > > > > The news servers were still configured, as is my score file, but every > > other setting is lost, I think. > > > > Of course, I only found out *after* I restarted Pan so files probably > > got over-written. I shut Pan down and made a copy of ~/.pan2 > > > > No, I did not have a back up. TBH, nothing I read/post to usenet is > > valuable enough that I'm bothered that it's gone. Most of the groups I > > read are from my ISPs news server and of the two they have, I use the > > text-only one which has a retention period measured in months, over a > > year for the ISP internal groups, so that's not an issue. > > > > What I would like to recover, if possible, is the profiles I set up. > > > > So, two questions. > > > > 1) is it likely there's copies of any of pans config files elsewhere? > > eg pan makes backups of changed files. > > Not that I know of.
Ok, I'll put thee straw back now. I knew there was no point in grasping for it ;-) > I just noticed that my posting.xml file is time-stamped yesterday evening > when I shut pan down, so pan clearly doesn't write to that file when you > start up, just when you shut down (or edit your profiles). Seems to me > that your posting.xml should have been intact at the time of the crash > unless you modified your profiles shortly before the crash. > > > 2) is this a situation pan should be able to cope with or is it simply > > that the files were left open and got trashed by fsck/buffers not being > > flushed? > > I'm no expert, but my experience has been that soft-updates prevents the > kind of data loss you describe. Are you using soft-updates on your file- > system? Yes, soft-updates are enabled. > BTW, what is in your posting.xml now? Does it look like the file that > pan2 would create the first time you ever use it, or are there some hints > of your previous profiles that are corrupted? It looks like a newly installed default config. Looks like it was totally trashed and Pan built a new, default one. > I'm not sure what pan does if it finds a corrupt posting.xml, but I'll > do some experimenting after I post this. I've done some since I posted. If posting.xml is missing one of the following can happen. 1 Pan creates a new one on exiting the program. 2 Pan creates a new one if you create and save a profile. 3. If you delete an existing posting.xml while pan is running, both 1 and 2 above apply. -- Dave _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
