I am using the latest nightlies. I was working on a project this morning, saved it and exited from Kicad. Later I downloaded today’s nightly (April 2) and re-started Kicad. On the same PC. Win 10, 64 bit pro. I went to “Recently opened” and opened what I had been working on. It showed me a version of the project from about 2 weeks ago! Yikes! I looked at the .pro file and I can’t see how it associates the schematics. The .pro file has an old date stamp. The .sch files have today’s date stamp. How come? If I open the schematics one at a time (not as a project), I see some of my recent edits, but not all- some appear to have been lost. I spend almost as much time in Notepad++ looking at files as I do in Kicad. Is there a description somewhere of how a “project” file finds the other files? After a while there is a lot of “bloat” in the project directory. I have 40 or so files and about a dozen sub-directories. I have saved the .bak files every time Kicad seems to go off the rails.
By and large I like V5, the number of times it crashes seems to be going down- maybe once or twice a day rather than once or twice an hour, so that is progress. But having the project revert is scary.
Any thoughts on how to restore a project that has a split personality like this?
I think that KiCad looks for the main schematic sheet with the same base name as the pro file, if the project file is called fred.pro, the main sheet should be fred.sch. All the other sheets are found from the main sheet. The project file contains some general config but often doesn’t get written, so I would not be surprised to see an old date in it.
I can’t explain where the data has gone, obviously taking daily backups is the solution but that cannot be applied retrospectively. You seem to have a much higher tolerance for crashes than me!
I am running it under Widows 10, 64 bit. I just accept the defaults suggested by the installer.
I just assumed that (as stated) that the nightlies are more prone to issues, so I haven’t worried.
I think I will try to clean out the directory so it only has the bare minimum in there. I have a number of backups, apparently somehow it is finding a version of the main.sch that is out of date.
V5 rc is more stable than 4.0.7 these days for me.
No guarantees that a GitHub commit might make Nightly go haywire, but fairly unlikely at this stage of the release cycle.
After removing all saved versions of my project files my original problem has gone away. Apparently the project was finding an old (saved) version of the schematic in one of my “save” sub-folders.
But I stand by my statement- not a day goes by without a crash under Windows 10.
Anyhow, I consider my original problem solved. Thank you to all who gave this some thought!
@Gordon;
Why save the .bak files? They are probably the oldest.
40 files seems excessive. What kind of files are those???
I often delete intermediately generated files (such as the *.bak, *.net *.dcm and others) to clean up.
I won’t be surprized if you made a copy of your project in a subdir to try out V5 and then accidentally opened an old copy instead of the latest version.
A very easy and relatively convenient way to backup your work is to simply create .zip archives which start with the date in ISO8601 format, then the project name, and a possible extra string as remider of what you changed.
Filenames such as:
2018-01-05_led_blinker_Changed_leds_to_green.zip.
2018-02-23_led_blinker_Added_More_Leds.zip.
2018-03-05_led_blinker_KiCad_V5_Experiment.zip.
???
Even if KiCad would run flawlessly as root I would refuse to do so.
These hold the symbol documentation information (description, keyword and datasheet url)
There is no other file that has this. (Every .lib file also comes with a .dcm file)
The reason is that these 3 “fields” are the only things that can differ between different aliases of a symbol.
3 's for Rene,
that may well be the reason datasheet links do not work properly on my linux box.
I really should take some time to read KiCad’s reference manuals someday…
We devs would love to hear more details about the crashes you experience. Having multiple crashes per day (not to mention per hour!) is definitely not expected with the 5.0 release candidates or nightly builds these days. In my experience it is quite stable on all the platforms I test (Linux, Windows 10, and Mac OS). The only instances I know of where KiCad crashes all the time have been due to problems with graphics card drivers, and were avoidable by either upgrading drivers or turning off graphics acceleration in KiCad. Any detail you can provide will help us fix the issues if they are under our control.
