Re: [Audacity-quality] "Delete orphaned files (safe and recommended)"

[Steve t. F. <ste...@gm...>]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Bill Wharrie <bi...@go...> wrote:
>
> On 3-Nov-10, at 6:34 PM, Steve the Fiddle wrote:
>
>> "Delete orphaned files (safe and recommended)"
>> Under what circumstances is it safe and/or recommended?
>>> From my own experience, and from numerous posts on the forum it is
>> profoundly unsafe and to be avoided as it destroys the last ditch hope
>> of salvaging data from a broken project.
>>
>> Steve D
>
> If the files are "orphaned" that means there is no reference to them
> in the AUP file. The only time you wouldn't want to delete the
> orphaned files is if you were prepared to manually stitch those
> orphaned files back into your project - a non-trivial undertaking.
> There is no way to automatically stitch the .au files of a 1.3.x
> project back together the way there was for 1.2.
>
> -- Bill

Certainly it is a non-trivial undertaking, but providing the data has
not been erased it is not impossible.

On the grounds of "difficulty", the error message could say something like:
"Orphaned block files detected. If this is a result of a crash it will
be extremely difficult salvage any of this data. Delete? Yes/No"
rather than saying that it is "Safe" to delete the files.

The message is also used in Audacity 1.2.x where crash recovery tools
do exist, so "difficulty" is clearly not the reason for the current
wording.

"Append Import" is a highly requested feature that I hope will one day
be implemented and a side effect of such a feature is that it would
ease the pain of manually stitching together orphaned data files.

In the mean time, I'd prefer that "Safe and recommended" was dropped
from the error message.
The wiki is probably a more appropriate place for making
recommendations rather than an error message.

Steve