BeerAlchemy Mac 1.8.6
I just uploaded BeerAlchemy 1.8.6 for Mac. This release has only one change over 1.8.5 but it's a pretty important change.
For some reason, at some point, data corruption appears to be creeping into text fields in the app. What happens is that 'special characters' (e.g the degrees symbol, non-English characters) get corrupted and a large amount of invisible junk gets inserted into the files, every time the file is saved this junk grows until either BeerAlchemy gets too slow to use or the app simply can't load the file as it's too large (hundreds of megabytes)
What the new release does is check the length of any text fields. If they are over 10,000 characters long it replaces the entire text with a piece of placeholder text. I realize this could be seen as rather drastic but given the choice of losing some text or all your recipes I know which I'd choose...
Currently it seems that this problem occurs with text entered in the past (it hasn't been seen to happen with stuff entered after version 1.8.4). But it seems that once the corruption had started it would still continue to happen and get worse with newer versions. Hopefully, the changes I've made in the last few releases will catch the problem before it gets out of hand and eventually it will disappear altogether.
For some reason, at some point, data corruption appears to be creeping into text fields in the app. What happens is that 'special characters' (e.g the degrees symbol, non-English characters) get corrupted and a large amount of invisible junk gets inserted into the files, every time the file is saved this junk grows until either BeerAlchemy gets too slow to use or the app simply can't load the file as it's too large (hundreds of megabytes)
What the new release does is check the length of any text fields. If they are over 10,000 characters long it replaces the entire text with a piece of placeholder text. I realize this could be seen as rather drastic but given the choice of losing some text or all your recipes I know which I'd choose...
Currently it seems that this problem occurs with text entered in the past (it hasn't been seen to happen with stuff entered after version 1.8.4). But it seems that once the corruption had started it would still continue to happen and get worse with newer versions. Hopefully, the changes I've made in the last few releases will catch the problem before it gets out of hand and eventually it will disappear altogether.
posted by Steve Flack at 1:17 PM
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2 Comments:
I had this problem (thanks to using the degrees symbol) and had my text replaced with placeholder. I suspect I know the answer already (which would be "no"), but is there a way to recover the text that was removed? I'd be happy to put it into a text edit app and delete the offending corrupt characters then recopy into the proper field in the new version of the app...
Sadly you suspect correctly. The best thing to do if you know you use these characters is to go through them now and fix it before you lose the data.
Oh...and update to 1.8.7.
I realize this isn't ideal and I'm sorry this happens. I was caught out by it and basically code that was working fine for 4 years suddenly but silently broke. It seems that it's something in the past now though and once we get past this sticky patch we should be OK in the future.
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