'Pack and Go' Woes

[BergtholdB]

I use 'Pack and Go' to keep our home server and my laptop sync'd. When I 'Bring in data from an existing pack and go file', it restores both the data and photo files, but when DM goes to restart, I'll get an error... something like 'Error instantiating cursor object. Cannot find c:\donor5\filtdet.dbf.', with the options to 'Locate...', 'Ignore', 'Cancel', or 'Help'.

I chose the option to 'Locate...' (and since I grew up in the DOS world and have windows set to show file extensions and system / hidden files), it was easy to see that the attributes on the file C:\donor5\data\filtdet.dbf were set to system / hidden. I used the attrib -S -H command to clear the flags, and DM started normally. I also found that several files in my photo directory also had the system and hidden flags set.

It doesn't seem to be something anyone else is dealing with, since I haven't seen a bug report on it yet. It'd be interesting to know just how and when the attributes are being changed.

I tried a quick test and found that if I restored files created on my laptop, back to my laptop... there wasn't a problem. But, if I restored files created on our home server to my laptop... I had the problem. Both computers are running DM 5.55.0 under Windows XP SP3. I tried it with the files stored locally and across the network - it didn't seem to matter.

[jmuehleisen]

Barry,

Thanks for the detailed bug report. Very interesting.

There is certainly nothing in the DM (that I know of) that is messing with file attributes. It's just a straight copy / compression / uncompression routine happening here in the "pack and go" file.

And, I've never had this behavior reported before, the file attribute changing is intriguing.

At this point, I can't imagine what might be going on. Sorry.