Crash when launching 5.9, lost all thumbnails, movies, manuals, etc.

[Scoremonger]

Hi, I've had a catastrophic crash with Launchbox 5.9 that erased all my covers, art, movies and manuals. Sadly, I didn't capture the exact error message at the time of the crash, not realizing how bad it was, but here's my best recollection of what happened. Sorry it's long - never know what clue might be the key to fixing a bug so I want to be as thorough as my sleep-deprived brain will allow. ;) I have an external drive with my LaunchBox setup (emulators, roms, covers, etc.) so I can move it from machine to machine. After scraping some covers, videos, etc. on my desktop PC I moved the drive to my laptop and launched LaunchBox.exe. I got a .NET-style crash complaining about being unable to find some path. I assumed it was just something to do with the drive letter mapping on my desktop PC vs. laptop - I have the external drive mapped to L: on my main PC, but it defaults to D: on my laptop. I'd run LB once before on my laptop without issue, but I'd done a bunch more scraping/emulator setup from my desktop PC since so I figured it had to do with that. I closed the crash message, ran again, and got another crash. So I remapped the drive on my laptop to L: and launched again. This time it didn't crash, but all my thumbnails were gone. I checked the folders on the drive and sure enough they were ALL empty - no covers, no movies, no manuals, no nothing. I closed LB and looked at the config files and xmls for clues, searching through the folders for .jpgs, etc, but no luck. So I tried relaunching LB, and it crashed again - this time no error message, just the standard "LaunchBox.exe has stopped working..." message. I tried BigBox and it launched without crashing. I shut down BB and rebooted. After the reboot Windows 10 tells me my drive has errors that need to be repaired. I let it do the repairs, and the drive seems to be working fine, although all the scraped data are still gone. At this point I'm thinking, "OK, maybe I've got a bad drive - it's brand new, but these things happen." but then I start searching the forums for similar problems and notice this loss of all cover images has happened to at least one other user on an older LB release. So I think the problem lies with the software. As a test, I tried reinstalling LB in another folder and that one launches fine. So I copied the exe from the original installation folder and ran it from the new folder, and it also launches fine. But launching from the original installation directory still crashes. So the data it's accessing in the original installation folder is corrupted and LB is not handling it well, I guess. Hopefully this helps you track down the cause of this bug - luckily I only had a couple gigs of movies, screenshots and manuals to replace, but I can't imagine how long it would take to recover a really large collection.

[Jason Carr]

Hi @Scoremonger, thanks for reporting this. However, I am 100% certain that LaunchBox did not cause that data loss. In every single instance in the past where images/videos/whatever were lost, it was caused by something moving around (just looking in a different path and the files are still there), or user error. LaunchBox does not just go out and delete files, and it's impossible for LaunchBox to do that by an error occurring. Metadata getting corrupted in the LaunchBox.xml file is one thing, but completely missing files is very different. The only time when LaunchBox has any code to delete files is during image cleanup, but since obviously you didn't run that operation, it's not possible for LaunchBox to have deleted any files. Obviously though you've had file system errors; that's what's happened here. You don't have to have a bad drive to run into that issue. Sometimes a power loss or hard reset can cause these issues, and sometimes it's extremely hard to track down. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to back up your entire collection just in case a bad drive or file system errors like this occur; even though LaunchBox does not cause these kinds of issues, they can and will happen eventually. External drives are even more likely to run into issues like this due to always being moved around and plugged/unplugged.

[Scoremonger]

Wow, that was maybe the fastest support request I've ever gotten, thanks. To show you where I'm coming from, I should mention I have worked professionally with software that occasionally and inadvertently corrupts data, either through a fault in its own code or through some obscure underlying .NET/DevExpress/ flaw. I didn't delete the files myself, and the files are definitely gone (I've searched the whole drive and verified the paths LB is using are correct), so I'm confident in saying it's not user error either. All that said, since you're certain LB isn't to blame, and given how flaky drives can be (especially external ones, as you say) I'll assume your conclusion is right and a file system error is to blame here. I find it odd that it has only affected all the scraped data and nothing else. But since I don't have any deep knowledge of drive tech I'll assume that's not as unlikely as it seems. Regarding backups, I agree - I have my game collection backed up twice-over. Thumbnails, movies and such are fairly new toys for me, so I haven't yet made any backups for them. But that's no big deal. Launchbox downloaded them easily the first time and will get them easily again. I'm not here to complain about that, just to alert you to a potentially terrible bug. If the trouble is all on my side, that's fantastic. Truly, because I love LaunchBox so far and have no desire to use anything else.

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, typically the files that go missing are the files that were in use at the time of the incident. It is possible that LaunchBox had a bunch of files open and hence they went missing during whatever file system error occurred. Are you using FAT32 on the drive, exFAT, or NTFS?

[DOS76]

File system errors are for real. I had an issue with USB 3.0 devices (MediaSonic ProBox 4 bay drive enclosure) with firmware that caused the drive to constantly spin down when not in use. The constant powering off of the drives caused me to lose file on every drive connected to USB on my Windows Server 2012R2 Essentials box. I could recover them by going into the hard disks properties click the tools tab and then click Check. It would find the files and put them in a found folder which will be hidden. If I remember correctly is you type \found.000 after the drive letter in the address bar it will open the folder. Initially I had to move the boxes back to my Windows Home Server 2011 since it didn't have the firmware issues then eventually I got MediaSonic to send me some firmware updater and flashed the boxes. Very much PITA but it resolved the issue.

[Scoremonger]

Thanks @Jason Carr, This drive is using NTFS, and is quite new (I bought it a few months ago and only started using it in the last few weeks.) I've also had file system errors in the past that nuked whole folders, just never with a drive so new. But people sometimes get brand new drives that won't even spin up, so all sorts of problems are possible. Based on what you're saying, I'm guessing that LaunchBox had all those files open and the file system lost its marbles at the worst possible moment. I'll just make incremental backups as I scrape data and cross my fingers that my drive keeps itself together. @DOS76 thanks for the comment - checking the disk didn't yield any files this time, but it's good to know that's a possibility.

[Jason Carr]

External hard drives actually terrify me because of those issues. It's more expensive, but it's much safer to get a Dropbox account (which are now 1 TB large) and just sync to all your machines. That way you always have a backup in the cloud, and you can always restore deleted/missing files. If you get the extra versions feature, you can get back any version of any file, even from 6 months ago. It is expensive but I can't live without it these days. I subscribe to Crashplan on top of that for proper cloud backups (space is unlimited for that so I have like 15 TB backed up). Then there's the RAID 1 I use in my machines just in case a drive dies. I'm a little bit nuts I will admit but haven't had any data loss in 15 years. Still have my development projects from high school. ;)

[Scoremonger]

@Jason, I wanted to follow up on this and confirm what you suspected was definitely correct - LaunchBox had nothing to do with the data loss; that drive was a piece of junk. It managed to nuke more of my data without any assistance from any software, and was constantly suffering file system errors. I've since returned it and moved to a slightly smaller but much, much more reliable drive. I've had no lost data since and have been having a great time with LaunchBox. For anyone wondering, the faulty drive was a 5TB Seagate Backup Plus, purchased at Costco (who accepted the return without packaging and without question.)

[Jason Carr]

Great to hear; thanks for following up @Scoremonger. :)

[DOS76]

I have 4 of those and I haven't had an issues with them so far some times you just get a bad drive unless its a PNY then its all the time.

[SentaiBrad]

I've had more issues with Seagate so I started going back to Western Digital. I also agree, I will never get anything PNY ever again as long as I live.