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    Fix corrupted txt file (NULL)

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    • Scott SumnerS
      Scott Sumner @Igor Galochkin
      last edited by

      @Igor-Galochkin

      I feel your pain–actually I felt it only once and I didn’t lose much (only about 2 hours of work)–but still… It is a known issue, at least to posters here on this forum–see my list of links in this thread–but I don’t know that it is getting much if any attention from developers.

      There is a theory (not mine…but I can’t prove/disprove it) that having one of the backup methods turned ON causes or contributes to the chain of events that allows this data loss to occur. I know that when it happened to me (via a hardware-related BSOD) that I did indeed have Verbose backups enabled and backups were being made right up until the time of crash. Unfortunately, my experience was that all files I had changed and saved during that particular Notepad++ editing session (2 hours old) were wiped out, including all backups made during that time.

      I always had my own backup plan in place, entirely separate from Notepad++'s control, which is why I didn’t lose a lot. I recommend everyone do the same…even after this issue is resolved!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • PeterJonesP
        PeterJones
        last edited by PeterJones

        At one point last month, I tried using the windows API from an external process to try to kill the Notepad++ instance, and see if I could reliably replicate the issue, but I couldn’t get it to trigger; apparently, even killing the process externally is too “clean” of an exit.

        Today, I began to think that maybe there was a way to force a Windows Blue Screen Of Death while running NPP, and see if it could replicate the problem – my thought was in a Virtual Machine, to protect any actual hardware.

        I found this MS TechNet post which explains how to initiate a BSOD. It has a disclaimer, “you cannot manually initiate a Stop error on a virtual machine that has virtual machine extensions installed”, but that implies that a VM without extensions installed should be able to be forced to BSOD.

        I don’t have a VM (or a physical machine that I could risk), nor do I have the windows-app debugging skill necessary to figure out what’s going wrong, even if I could replicate the problem reliably… but I thought I’d share the idea, in case someone else has the right tools and skillset.

        (I posted this almost verbatim in the GitHub issue #2381, but thought I’d share it here, too.)

        Scott SumnerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
        • Scott SumnerS
          Scott Sumner @PeterJones
          last edited by

          @PeterJones

          Right after the issue happened to me, I tried manually forcing some BSODs on an old machine (running Windows 7) that I don’t care so much about. I had no luck in replicating the NUL corruption thing that way, even though I was careful in my attempt to set up the exact Notepad++ configuration I had been running (fairly easy as I use the “portable” version). As my original BSOD was “hardware-related”, I couldn’t duplicate that part in the recreation…

          So I like your thinking, but no-dice for me when I tried it a bit ago…

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Igor GalochkinI
            Igor Galochkin
            last edited by Igor Galochkin

            @Scott Sumner
            Just today I found out that Dropbox (even the free account of it) saves versions of files, so it kind of acts like a version control system (e.g. SVN), but you don’t have to do manual commits - any time you save the file, Dropbox stores another version of the file. I suppose on the backend they have some SVN-like implementation of this functionality (saving only the changes), but to the user it just looks like separate, chronologically listed versions of the file. Even if Dropbox doesn’t keep the versions for long, or has a limit on the combined size of all the versions, it’s still an excellent defense vs these sudden power outages or blue screens. Because after the computer restart one surely will still have the few copies just before the outage in Dropbox (plus the last NULL-filled copy).
            So, yeah, setting Dropbox to start together with Windows is important then.
            And btw one doesn’t even have to keep all the important files in the Dropbox folder. Instead, one can create a “junction” for the most important files or folders (https://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/sync-other-folders).
            Lesson learnt :)

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • Igor GalochkinI
              Igor Galochkin
              last edited by Igor Galochkin

              Oh my, just found out that setting “Verbose backup” in Notepad++ now creates a folder named “nppBackup” at the same place as the txt file and saves the backups there each time you save. If you don’t want to clog your folders with all these multiple nppBackup subfolders, you can set a custom path where all the backups of all edited files will be saved, e.g. some folder inside Dropbox.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Alessandro Lo CuocoA
                Alessandro Lo Cuoco
                last edited by Alessandro Lo Cuoco

                It seems that when data is apparently replaced by null characters information is not actually lost. I searched on the web and I found that using a file recovery application (Recuva) one can still obtain the original file without any loss of information (I tried this myself). This is very strange, as it’s not clear where this information come from if the “null” characters are really “null”…

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • chcgC
                  chcg
                  last edited by

                  @Claudia-Frank @pnedev
                  See https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/blob/master/PowerEditor/src/CMakeLists.txt and https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/tree/master/PowerEditor/gcc
                  for cross compilation. Open PRs needed:
                  https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/pull/4320
                  https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/pull/3918
                  https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/pull/4145

                  Claudia FrankC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • Claudia FrankC
                    Claudia Frank @chcg
                    last edited by

                    @chcg

                    thank you but since installing VS2017 in my VM it is good enough.
                    It does take <1 minute to do a full clean compile of npp, scintilla and python script plugin
                    and ~15-20 seconds for code changes to test.

                    Cheers
                    Claudia

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Manikandan PalaniappanM
                      Manikandan Palaniappan
                      last edited by Manikandan Palaniappan

                      Hi All,
                      In my case, file size is showing 7kb and unable to find that file in back up folder. When I open it shows Null in Notepad++, empty in Notepad.
                      I tried Recuva and restore the file, again context is not readable.
                      Restore previous version is also not available. I’m using Windows 10 64 bit OS
                      Please help me to recover file

                      Thanks,
                      Mani

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • Iain CheyneI
                        Iain Cheyne
                        last edited by

                        I fixed a corrupted file using the deep scan feature of Recuva.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • Rahul AroraR
                          Rahul Arora
                          last edited by

                          for anyone still looking for this!
                          right click on the file -> properties -> previous versions, -> open, …
                          check contents before you hit restore.
                          saved 7 days of work!!!

                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • Joe DoughertyJ
                            Joe Dougherty
                            last edited by

                            Anyone know if this has been fixed? I’m using an older version 7.3.3 64-bit version on Windows 10. Its always been solid. After my last two reboots the files I had been working on previously have turned into all null bytes. Not empty files - each character in the file is now null. Major PITA.

                            Scott SumnerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                            • Scott SumnerS
                              Scott Sumner @Joe Dougherty
                              last edited by

                              @Joe-Dougherty said:

                              Anyone know if this has been fixed?

                              I have seen no evidence that any changes have been made to date in regard to preventing this from occurring. It happened to me when using 7.2.2.

                              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • Mark CageM
                                Mark Cage
                                last edited by Mark Cage

                                Had the same catastrophe today. System Crashed (windows 7). Npp ver. 6.9.

                                Text file contents coming as null.

                                Used the recuva technique and got everything back!!

                                Learnt about verbose backup and updating to the latest Npp version.

                                Thank you all.

                                Scott SumnerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • Scott SumnerS
                                  Scott Sumner @Mark Cage
                                  last edited by

                                  @Mark-Cage said:

                                  …updating to the latest Npp version

                                  Most people in your situation say something different…Like “I’m switching to Sublime / Atom”…

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                  • Mark CageM
                                    Mark Cage
                                    last edited by

                                    @Scott-Sumner said:

                                    Sublime / Atom

                                    I love npp! There might some issues in the other text editors as well

                                    Just enable verbose backup and i think i should be fine :)

                                    Scott SumnerS 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                    • Scott SumnerS
                                      Scott Sumner @Mark Cage
                                      last edited by

                                      @Mark-Cage

                                      Just enable verbose backup and i think i should be fine

                                      There are some people with the theory that that actually contributes to the NUL problem (i.e. they postulate that if backup was off it wouldn’t/couldn’t occur). I can attest that the one time the NUL problem happened to me, I did indeed have verbose backup turned on. I had a bunch of files that the v.b. creates (so I thought "No problem!), but they too were all filled with NUL, back to the time at which I had started the current Notepad++ run. I lost about 2 hours of work when I should have only lost about 2 seconds worth (I am old-school and am “all over” the Save key…constantly). YMMV. :-)

                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
                                      • Mark CageM
                                        Mark Cage
                                        last edited by

                                        That sucks! i hadn’t turned back up on before this happened . Also use the save key all the time. But the null error still occurred. Can only pray that it doesn’t happen again :)

                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • Lucky ErumeborL
                                          Lucky Erumebor
                                          last edited by

                                          same thing just happened to me… v7.5.8

                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • Claudia FrankC
                                            Claudia Frank
                                            last edited by

                                            Gotcha!!

                                            Hopefully I can reproduce it under debugger.

                                            Cheers
                                            Claudia

                                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
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