Hi,
I’m using Elan 3.8.1 on a macbook pro (OS 10.5). Although I have Elan to automatically save every 5 mins, and it’s creating.001 files, Elan does not actually seem to be saving information. I found this out the hard way after a crash (I had opened a bunch of files, found the associated media, and made various annotation corrections - I now have to do all that again because nothing seems to have saved - I have to reassociate all the media files again).
Also a more general comment - Elan on OSX seems to become more buggy and unstable with each version. Can we please stop having new features before the current ones work properly and the program doesn’t crash when more than 1 file is open (which cancels out most of the usefulness of the multifile search possibilities)? Like functioning keyboard shortcuts? Or if people want lots of features, could you consider releasing a version that just does annotation, search and export, but which is stable enough that it actually works?
Thanks,
Claire
So far I haven’t been able to reproduce the backup problem. Whenever I turn automatic backup on it seems that all information, including new media locations, is stored in the “.001” file. If I change annotations and media associations without saving, the original eaf and the 001 backup are different after the next automatic save action.
This makes it a bit difficult to fix.
About the more general comments: almost each new release of ELAN contains both bug fixes and new features, sometimes only bug fixes. I think fixing bugs, especially those that can cause data loss, and improving stability have high priority. But we need to have some clue of where things go wrong: right now I wouldn’t know what to change in the backup system (except for using more than one file for backup, e.g 001 to 005, as planned).
About keyboard shortcuts: you might want to read this (http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/elanforum/post201003232997747108) discussion about some Mac specific problems. In the case of the shortcuts a new feature, customizable shortcuts, is maybe the best way to “solve” problems people might have on different platforms. And I don’t think a crash when there is more than one file open is a common problem
Hi Han,
It seems that the backup is working ok with annotation changes but not with media locations
the navigation bug appears to be fixed in 3.9 - Thanks! Elan also loads faster and the video playback is much more stable. (I take back my previous posts /…)
Claire
Quite a few of my students and I are experiencing the same no back-up problem. We are working on various Macs, running OS X 10.5 and using ELAN 3.9. We have automatic back-up set to Save every minute. But if we don’t also manually select Save from the File menu every once in a while, it doesn’t seem to save. At least sometimes. I’ve been watching the Finder window where the .eaf file is saved, and the “modified” time changes only if I manually select Save from the File menu, rather than every minute, as I’d expect with a feature called Automatic Backup.
Please let us know if there is a fix for this, or what further info I could provide to help find this problem.
Thanks.