Re: a basic XY III+ glitch?

["C.Caballero" Carlo.Caballero@xxxxxxxx]

Dear Lynn,
Minus the carriage returns, I had similar things happen to me around 2003
when my old PC was falling apart. In my case, it was a hard drive or
operating system problem rather than a XyWrite III problem, except insofar
as XyWrite has that habit of creating overflow files while you're working
on long texts--that's a huge window of vulnerability in the way XyWrite
saves and writes data. Basically, the overflows were not attaching
themselves properly back to the working file; either they were getting big
enough to stall the system, or other (unrelated) files were being tacked
onto the working file, creating monsters like the one you encountered when
you looked at your directory.
A few of my files were permanently corrupted in this manner. Then I got
rid of that machine, and things returned to normal with XyWrite on the new
one.
So my recommendation would be to keep backing up, and if this happens to
you again, look at a new computer or new hard drive.

Cheers,
Carlo

Carlo Caballero

Associate Professor & Erma Mantey Faculty Fellow
University of Colorado
College of Music, 301 UCB
18th & Euclid
Boulder CO 80309-0301

thyrsus@xxxxxxxx

On Sun, 1 Nov 2015, Lynn Brenner wrote:
> I've been using Xywrite daily for three plus decades, and this is a first:
>
> As I was typing additional thoughts into a file, the XY screen started
> shimmying and the text I was typing was replaced by a series of return
> arrows in the left margin. I quickly hit F5 Store, which of course may have
> been a mistake.
>
> On opening the file again, I find the first couple of paragraphs (written
> days ago) intact, but only that string of return arrows below them.
>
> What's odd is that in the directory, this file is now a whopping size --
> 344127. The file was less than 12000 when I opened it this morning, and I
> hadn't even written a complete sentence before the screen began dancing and
> arrows replaced words. That suggests an enormous file, not just a few
> paragraphs followed by no more than a couple of pages of arrows.
>
> Can any of you shed light on what has happened?
>
> Lynn Brenner