Crash during Paratext Live - book deleted!

Question

We experienced a strange error while using Paratext Live, and without knowing why I’m hesitant to use the Live feature now. Only two computers were connected (on a strong wifi signal), both running PT8. Our main focus at the time was changing the Biblical Terms renderings for Matthew, doing a few textual changes here and there. With the PT Live I can get the textual changes from the translator’s computer but not the Biblical Term tool changes. So I did an “exchange all files” from my computer, and as soon as the translator’s computer started “syncing” his PT program crashed (and I did not get his Biblical Term tool updates). We reopened the program to find the entire book of Matthew gone from his project!!

I tried looking at project history, and recent changes but it was as if the project had just been imported (with the exception of Matthew). Also all terms in the Biblical Terms tool were now empty. I next tried a send/receive (since my computer still had the latest text). But we got an error message saying:

“Paratext cannot preform the operation because the repository (archive file name) is not related to your project”

The only thing I could think to do at that point is delete the project, after which a S/R added the project back in as a new project, but without the recent changes to the Biblical Terms tool. The amount of work we had to redo was minimal, but it did give the team a good scare!

Has anyone else experienced this error before (I tried searching for this error message in the forum and didn’t get an exact match)? Furthermore, did I do something to cause the crash?

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Answer 1

Hello jwagner,

The best thing to do is to use Help > Report a Problem on both computers and to mention that it’s a PTLive problem in the summary.

I don’t know of anything that would cause what you are reporting - it implies that all project history got deleted from the local copy of the project. Project history would be recreated on the next send/receive or other command that causes a change to be committed, but the local history would now be incompatible with the history on the send/receive server.

We’ll have to see if there are any clues in the problem reports that you send.

John+Wickberg

Paratext Support

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Comments

Thanks John+Wickberg, I was able to submit a report from the Translator’s computer, but I was not able to replicate the problem, so I’m not sure how much help it will be. I’m just thankful we didn’t lose any of the textual changes!

I’m sure you don’t hear it as often as you should, but the features of Paratext are a phenomenal help to us in our work, and the Paratext support team does an excellent job of maintaining and improving the program so that glitches and crashes are very rare, and mostly non-fatal. Thank you for all you do!

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I had another crash during Paratext live and this time the entire project was deleted from the translator’s computer! I was running PT9 and he had PT8, and once again the cause was me initiating an “exchange all files” from my computer.

This time I was able to do a send receive from my computer and then from his computer and he got the project back with all current changes - nothing was lost this time (since I’ve learned to hit save on my computer before doing an exchange all files).

PT Live is a great feature but it’s also the most unstable!

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Without the log files that are included in a problem report, there is very little chance that we will be able to find the problem.

It’s best for all users in the session to send in the report immediately after the problem.

There is a larger log file called PTLiveLog.txt that is in:

C:\Users{userName}\AppData\Local\Paratext80 for Paratext 8 and

C:\Users{userName}\AppData\Local\Paratext90 for Paratext 9

This file is normally too large to send by email and needs to be uploaded to a Google Drive or some other file sharing service and then a link included in the problem report.

John+Wickberg

Paratext Support

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