How Visual Paradigm (Nearly) Ruined my Day and Dropbox (Nearly) Saved it
For months I've been designing an architecture for a fictious system, which is required for the second part of the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA) exam. Today I came to my computer to make few final but important finishing touches to my UML diagrams. The notebook run out of battery and thus lost its in-memory suspended state – nothing special, it happens. But what an horror! When I started Visual Paradigm (which was running when I suspended the computer), my UML tool, it asked me whether to restore the auto-saved project – which could have been expected, and I agreed – and opened the project – with all texts lost!
VP screenshot - text-less class diagram
As you can see on the screenshot,even the package name got lost. It’s not only that the text isn’t visible – all the information about the model has simply disappeared from the project!
After a short period of panic I remembered that Dropbox, which I use to back up my SCEA folder and to share it with my home computer (I’m kind of paranoid since having may first computer that used to crash regularly due to overheating), keeps few recent versions of each file. Of course the latest version was corrupted because the notebook has already synchronized with Dropbox, but there were also two previous versions and the originally added one – what a relief!!!
While exploring the folder, I noticed two strange files, namely <my VP project file>.vpp~270 and <my VP project file>.vpp~271. Looks like VP is keeping backups of its own! And indeed, when I renamed the .vpp~271 file to .vpp and opened it with VP, my lovely diagrams were back in their latest state with all other information in place! And thus VP hasn’t ruined my day (rather many days) after all and I didn’t need Dropbox to save me.
Conclusion: Back up, back up, back up!
For the curious: I use Visual Paradigm for UML Modeler Edition 3.6 (I’ve also tried the latest community edition but it allows only a very limited number of diagrams – perhaps one? – before putting an unacceptably obtrusive watermark on each). I’ve a couple of reservations against its usability, responsivness, unnecessary limitations of what can be done on a diagram and its behavior, but it is the best tool I have.
(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)
Comments
Jean-Baptiste Nizet replied on Mon, 2010/05/17 - 6:56am
Not wanting to sound rude, but if you're preparing an exam for SCEA, and you don't use a version control system, then there's a problem.
Sebastian Konkol replied on Mon, 2010/05/17 - 7:36am
Jakub Holý replied on Mon, 2010/05/17 - 3:08pm
in response to:
Jean-Baptiste Nizet
Hi Jean, you do not sound rude - the truth itself is rude (as is often the case :-)).
I admit I was too lazy to set it up saying to myself that backing up to Dropbox and my home computer would be enough (which would actually help even if Dropbox didn't keep recent version because my home computer was offline and thus unable to pick up the corrupted file). Even though Dropbox is much better than nothing, a remote SCM keeping a full history would be indeed better. But, well, I sometimes just to lazy ... and this time it fortunately hasn't hit me back :-)
Michael Eric replied on Wed, 2012/09/26 - 3:53pm
Ugh, I know firsthand that you need to do as many backups as humanly possible – I’ve had my hard drive wipe in the middle of a project. Thank God for external backups, ya?
redhat