debian failed me

[ordoni]

I almost lost 5% of final mark, because debian failed to upload the file after saving changes. Last night, I made changes to a spreadsheet in gnumeric. I uploaded the file to my university account. This morning, just before class started, I opened the file to print at university and the changes I made last night were gone. I had to miss class, in order to redo the assignment and hand it in before end of class time.

I am very disappointed

[alain_]

This has nothing to do with Debian...

How did you uploaded the file(s)?

[ordoni]

It is probably a stability issue...........

I uploaded by browse and attach using mozilla (webmail)

[ericrun]

You should check the time stamps on the files, that might help you figure out what went wrong. After you do something important like this, it's good to double check your work. Download the file to another location on your home machine to double check that the changes you made are there, then you can be sure that the file at the remote location is the correct one. If a file is important, you might want to even save by a new name. Else, if your save corrupts, then you lose your original and the copy you were trying to save.

I took a backup at new years, and verified that it was OK. Two weeks later, I took another backup on the same disk, but didn't check that the files were OK. When my machine crashed a couple of weeks later, I got a new machine. When I tried to recover the files from my backup, the files were no good, and I'd lost my previous backup to this backup. In the end, I've lost 18 months of gnuCash files, and I had to rebuild my budget, and a couple of transaction tracking spreadsheets that I'd lost. That said, if something is important, it's a good idea to double and triple check to make sure everything is OK.

Sorry to hear about your difficulties.

[ordoni]

thanks for the tip, ericrun

I sould have double checked after uploading the file........

[kkubasik]

Whats more likely is that you either didn't save before uploading (the working version wouldn't have been implemented then. Or even more likely you saved the most recent copy in a different location/ with a different filetype.

[ordoni]

no.........i hit quick save

[danimalz]

this may have happened because
unixes often don't immediately write to disk
(even though you've clicked on save). many times the
data is saved in memory and the file looks to be updated
but until the system 'syncs' files (periodically) the data isn't
written.

im pretty much a newbie - i think you can use the command
'sync' to force the memory buffers to write.