“.BAK” backup files

Question

What are the “*.SFM.BAK” and other “*.BAK” files for? or, better, when and why are they created?

They can cause a problem if you accidentally select one, and its non-backup brother, when you Import Books: it would be nice if the subsequent two column display where you select which books to import had a third column showing the file name, so you could see which are the BAK files.

Answer 1

.bak files are created when the user saves edits to a text file. These are not shared (as far as I know). These are probably a holdover from the days prior to the project history and allowed the user to go back to the state previous to the last save.

In order to not include .bak files in imports I always sort the list by extension so that all of the .sfm files are together.

Comments

anon848905:

… saves edits to a text file.

Is that a different situation from a normal edit of the text? In one project, not all books in the project don’t have any BAK files, so I guess they don’t get created for every edit.

But in our main project I think every book that is active or finished has at least one backup, in fact, almost all have, for example, a “01GENTajU.BAK” and a “01GENTajU.SFM.BAK” – did the naming system get changed at some point?

These are not shared (as far as I know).

I’d be interested to know for sure.

Thanks.

---

.bak files are not sent with the S/R. They remain on the computer of the person who saved the data.

---

Only the book where edits are made get the .bak file. If you never touch Titus there will be no .bak file.

I think that in a previous version the convention was to change .sfm > .bak. The current convention is to simply add .bak.

---

Thanks. [Blah, must be <20 characters.]

Answer 2

Just for information:
.BAK files are created to avoid some nasty things that can happen when the computer crashes, the power goes out, etc. during the saving of a file. Basically it’s to make sure that there is a copy of the file on disk at all times so even if something goes horribly wrong, the previous version of the file can be recovered. With Project History this isn’t as critical as it used to be, but this is still needed as a history point is not made every time a file is saved.

Comments

It was very handy the other day when Paratext Live wiped out half my SFM file in the middle of a busy checking session.