[Audacity-devel] .bak files confusing users

[Markus M. <me...@me...>]

Hi,

I just wanted to talk about something that seems to happen sometimes to 
users in the German forum regarding the .aup.bak files Audacity creates 
by default. It seems that users are sometimes confused by them and open 
them instead of the .aup files [1]. Opening the .bak files usually 
triggers the "orphaned blockfiles" message. When users do the 
recommended thing ("delete files (usually safe)") and later notice their 
mistake, they close the project and try to open the .aup file instead, 
but the data files which were previously mistakenly recognized as 
"orphaned blockfiles" are already gone, leaving the user with a damaged 
project. If, on the other hand, the user does not recognize his mistake 
at first and then saves the project, another backup file is created 
("test1.aup.bak.bak"), adding to the confusion.

I can think of three possible fixes for this scenario:

1. Audacity should check if the project it tries to open really has the 
ending ".aup" and should refuse to open it if it has another ending.

2. Audacity should check if the project it tries to open specifically 
has the ending ".bak" and should refuse to open it in this case and show 
a message instead which educates the user about the fact that he is 
trying to open a ".bak" file instead of the "real thing".

Naturally, 1 and 2 can be combined in lots of ways ;-)

3. We just get rid of the .bak file. I actually do not see the value of 
the .bak file because Audacity, when saving an .aup file will delete 
blockfiles it does not need anymore anyway. So I'm not sure whether it 
makes sense to keep a .bak file, but when the user opens this .bak file 
he will be notified that the .bak file references data which does not 
exist anymore anyway. I can think of no use case where having a .bak 
file after accidentially deleting e.g. a track in Audacity will help the 
user to restore the data.

Of course, we should not simply overwrite the old .aup file when saving 
but we could, e.g., move the old .aup file to .aup.bak and delete 
.aup.bak after the .aup file has been written successfully and was 
closed (and possibly fsync()ed).

Please let me know what you think. I'm planning to implement either 1, 
2, or 3 if a consensus is reached.


Markus

[1]  Windows makes this easy, asking the user to "specify the program 
with which this file should be opened" in Explorer, if the user then 
chooses "Audacity", the file will open in Audacity despite being a .bak 
file. The fact that Windows does not show extensions by default also 
adds to the confusion. If both .bak and .aup files are associated with a 
program, Windows will show e.g. "project.aup" as "project" and 
"project.aup.bak" as "project.aup". If e.g. the user has heard from 
somewhere that he needs to open the "project.aup" file, he opens exactly 
the wrong file.