Frames file reset without notice

[Manokha]

I lost all my frames twice recently. The first time I was very lucky:

• I realised that I lost them before attempting any new watson "writing" commands (didn't know it would have ended up overwriting backup file then)
• I found the backup file and could overwrite current file with backup without issue, then reapplied the time frame that had been lost in the process

I though then that I would have access to a backup file when such things happen and moved on.

Yesterday, I lost all my frames again, but this time I realised it only one week after the loss. And frames.bak had been overwritten (probably a lot of times) since then. Which means I lost 4 months of time frames with no way of retrieving them.

Maybe I missed an error/warning message of some sort but:

• Frames should never be dropped without at least warning the user
• frames.bak should never be overwritten if it results in frames loss (overwrite if old.start >= current.start and old.end <= current.end)
• I'd rather lose my last few commands than months or more of data

[joelostblom]

That sounds quite worrying. I usually backup my frames file via a third party client in case something like this would happen, but haven't encountered it yet myself. What watson commands do you usually use? Do you mostly log data, or also work with reporting or any of the other subcommands?

[Manokha]

@joelostblom Hello, the commands I use daily are:

• watson start (and watson start --at), note that I have it configured to stop the current frame on start
• watson stop (and with --at)
• watson edit
• watson log (-d, -m, -y, and sometimes with -T)
• watson report (same as log)

This reminds me that I sometimes forget to stop a frame and shutdown the computer, then stop it the next day with --at, and the first time I lost frames was actually one of those occurrences (can't say about the second one since I didn't notice it right away, but it could be).

My watson version is 2.0.1 (speaking of which I'm going to upgrade to 2.1.0). I started backing up my frames as well :)