RECOVERING AN EDIT SESSION

This option is used to recover Edit Session results that were not previously saved.

Please read this help page completely before using the program.

Two pieces of information are required in order to recover the results of an Edit Session:

1) the name of the MARC sourcefile that was being edited 2) the Edit Session ID (see Notes below for details)

In practice, its possible to perform a recovery either by knowing the name of the MARC file, and then browsing through the work area until you locate the correct Edit Session folder; or, if you have the session ID, you can open the session work folder and find the name of the MARC file there (or perhaps, even a copy of that file, in many cases).

When the program opens, only the first action button is enabled. Therefore, you must click on the '1. MARC Source' button to select the MARC file that was being edited (or exit).

If the MARC source file validates, then the program will enable the second action button: '2. Edit Session'.

A list of all edit sessions that contain recoverable data appears on the right, with the most recent one first. Doubleclick on an item in this list to browse to that folder in windows explorer. Once you have identified the correct session ID, make sure it is selected in the list, then press the '2. Edit Session' button.

If you do not know the session ID, you will have to navigate through all of the work folders looking for the one that you want to recover. If you edited the same MARC file at different times, and restarted MARC Report each time, there will be one Edit Session folder for each time that you edited the file. So be sure to select the latest session that pertains to the MARC source file–start with the highest numbered session ID and work backwards.

When looking at folders in Windows explorer, its a good idea to make sure you have enabled the option to display the date and time the file was last changed on. To do this, open the 'View' menu in Windows and select 'Details'.

The edit session work folders often contain an exact replica of the MARC file you were editing (this depends on the size of the file, and your edit options). Keep in mind that this copy was made before any records were changed. This might work to your advantage. For example, if you worked on the same file all week, and saved your sessions twice a day–once at lunch and once before going home–you will, at the end of the week, have ten progressive snapshots of your work in the session work folders. Again, be careful to select the right session to recover!

Once a session ID has been selected, the program will try to validate it by building an index of changed records and comparing them to the records in the MARC source file. If this validation succeeds, then the third action button will be enabled.

Click the '3. Start Recovery' button to recover the Edit Session results. This process will run the same code that is normally run when an Edit Session is ended, the only difference being the name of the results file. To avoid overwriting existing files, the recovery process will ignore your Edit Session options and instead create a new file called 'recovered.sMMDD_nn.mrc' for the results (where 'MMDD' is the month and day, and '_nn' is the Session ID).

You should check this file after the recovery process is finished; as a rule, the only changes which might be lost will be those to the last record being edited at the time the misfortune occurred (but even those changes will be recovered if the 'Save' button was pressed).

NOTES

Everytime a MARC sourcefile is opened in MARC Report, a session work folder is created in a special area that Windows designates for this type of processing. By default, these work folders are located in– C:\Documents and settings\[user]\Local settings\Application Data\MarcReport –where '[user]' is your Windows login name.

The name of the session work folder will be the Edit Session ID, which is composed of the letter 'S', followed by the month and day (in the format MMDD), followed by an underscore, followed by a two-digit sequence number that is reset to '01' at the beginning of each day.

Whenever you press the Save button in MARC Report, the current record is output to a file in the session work folder. If you have edited a lot of records, the work folder will contain a corresponding number of small files, each one beginning with the letter 'M', and followed by a ten digit number. This number represents the record's address in the original sourcefile and is what the program uses to uniquely identify records in an edit session.

The work folder may contain other files besides the sourcefile and the 'M' files. All session work folders will probably contain a file named 'Titlelist-' followed by the Session ID–this is simply a textfile listing all the record titles (from the 245 field) in the file. Depending on your program Edit options, MARC Report may automatically copy the sourcefile to the session work folder whenever an Edit Session begins (this is always true if the sourcefile is on a floppy disk). The presence of a file called 'Index' generally indicates that the Edit Session was successfully saved; the same goes for a file called '_Changed.YYMMDDHHMM.mrc' and/or '_Deletes.YYMMDDHHMM.mrc'.

For the many times in which one opens a MARC file in MARC Report to have a quick look at the records, and then exits without making any changes, the program will try to cleanup the (more or less) empty session folder that is generated each time this happens.

In addition, non-empty Edit session work files and folders are periodically deleted to conserve disk space on your system. The option 'Clean-up Edit Work files' (on the Edit Sessions page) controls the timing of this clean-up. This option is set by default to 'Weekly', which means the program will always preserve at least 7 days of edit work files. This should be the right setting for most users, since if there is a problem, you will want to take care of it right away–won't you?

'ERROR INDEXING' MESSAGE

The successful recovery of an Edit Session depends upon the existence of the original sourcefile, and the session work folder, in particular, the 'M' files.

If, after step 3, you get an error message that begins 'Error indexing …', do not despair. This usually indicates that the program cannot write the results to the folder of the MARC sourcefile, something that can easily happen with files on floppies, or network drives.

To workaround this problem, follow these steps:

1. Start the recovery tool as before
2. Find the session ID in the list and doubleclick on it
3. Check whether your MARC sourcefile is already there
4. If it is not present, copy it into the session work folder.
5. Return to the recovery tool and select the MARC sourcefile from the work folder instead of from its original location.