I saved my workbench yesterday and today I reopened it. The restore workbench window popped up, so I thought something went wrong with saving, I pressed OK. However, my workbench was missing about 90% of the transformers, no connections whatsoever, only a few transformers, bookmarks and inspectors made it through. Is there any way to undo the restore? Or is there any backup location? There's weeks work in this workbench and I absolutely cannot afford to lose it.
Thanks in advance,
Pim
Hi @pim, such a situation could occur if you saved the workspace with a newer version FME Workbench and then reopened it with an older version. Firstly check FME version.
@pim Trying to understand the restore message - Was it either of these messages:
Really sorry but I think it could bad news especially if you saved the Workspace file again (overwriting) the file. There is no backup location. Workbench creates recovery data if there is a crash of Workbench, but if you have opened and closed the Workspace file this would have been lost. There is no versioning of a Workspace once it is closed. Within a single editing session you can use the history tool to go back to an earlier state in that session but not once the file is closed.
Thank you both for your quick responses,
@mark_1spatial It's the "A recovery file was found" message. The odd thing is, I wasn't able to save the workbench once I opened it through the recovery window(which I Interpreted as "this is the most recent version of the file").
Thanks again for the support and fast response, I really appreciate it.
Thank you both for your quick responses,
@mark_1spatial It's the "A recovery file was found" message. The odd thing is, I wasn't able to save the workbench once I opened it through the recovery window(which I Interpreted as "this is the most recent version of the file").
Thanks again for the support and fast response, I really appreciate it.
@pim - that message normally indicates that Workbench closed unexpectedly and the recover file could be used - when I see this I often go and copy the Workbench file before continuing to another location else as a backup. But as mentioned they tend to get cleaned up pretty quickly when reopening.
Another practice I follow is to version the Workspaces by naming with a version number or date. I invariably want to go back to a previous version. Version backup or source control (GIT, SVN etc.) is also recommended.
It's less of an answer and more of a comment, but since the FMW files are essentially text files, I use version control with Git. In fact, this recently helped me on a project I was working on when I went down a very dark and dirty rabbit hole and had to backtrack. I play it fast and loose with saving so I was able to go back to where I branched and unscrew my mistake. I know there is a lot of support around native version control but just wanted to share my 2 cents RE this topic.
You also get the added benefit of understanding the code behind the GUI if you know what you changed and look for it in the file.
Have a look in the app data folder. For me (Windows 7) it's in this location:C:\\Users\\imark\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\
Check out files beginning "wb" especially wb-xlate and wb_recovery
You might get lucky...
Other than (looking for) temp files, don't make any more edits or saves to the file you do have. Send it to our support team (safe.com/support) and get them to look at it (or ask them to get a developer to look at it). Sometimes it might look like items are missing, but they are in the file somewhere and Workbench just isn't showing them. It might (and I stress the "might") be possible to get something back.