Beer Smith crashed and lost all recipes, trouble restoring from archive

I had Beer Smith crash recently and upon opening I needed to re-activate my copy. I then found that all of my recipes had disappeared from the program. I understand that there is a manual way to bring my recipes back by opening each within Beersmith and then pasting into the folder where I want to keep them. The trouble here is that the only place I can find my recipes, the "Archive" folder, has about 200 files in it, whereas I only had about 30 recipes saved. Obviously there is some sort of duplication going on; how do I bring back only my 30 or so recipes, in their most updated format, without having to do this open/copy/paste exercise 200+ times?

Thanks!

The format of the files in the archive folder, by the way, is not immediately intuitive. E.g.: "Ar-11-11-15-36-6_9415"

Within the Beersmith folder I have:
-An "Archive" folder with all these recipe files
-A "Backup" folder with nothing in it
-A "Reports" folder with a bunch of .htm files
-A "Updates" folder with nothing in it
-And a bunch of .bsmx files that appear to be profiles (Water1, Shop1, Yeast1, etc.)

Wish I could help, but I am having the exact same issue as you. Will keep my eye on this thread for a response with a solution.
Good Luck!

Crashes have been reported when "&" is used in a recipe name. I'm able to confirm this bug is still an issue when it's added tot he end of a beer name. Was a similarly named recipe being modified or viewed when the program crashed?

The Archive files are a failsafe way to find recipes, but cumbersome because they are every single revision made to it, sorted only by date.

BeerSmith uses Documents/BeerSmith2 as the default location for your recipes and customized profiles. When you find it, create and backup folder and copy the contents to it.

With BeerSmith open: File > Open File > Documents/[Backup Folder]

Inside this folder, you should find Recipes.bsmx, plus backups labeled 1-5. Clicking on any of them will open BeerSmith with a window of those recipe folders. I would start with Recipe5.bsmx and work backwards to find the most recent set. You can then copy and paste these recipes into the main BeerSmith recipe window.

Thanks Brewfun--unfortunately I don't have a file called recipes.bsmx anywhere on my hard drive...so maybe the way to go is to restore from my archive folder. Is there any way to figure out which of those 200+ files are the most recent? The naming convention is somewhat confusing

brewfun said:

Crashes have been reported when "&" is used in a recipe name. I'm able to confirm this bug is still an issue when it's added tot he end of a beer name. Was a similarly named recipe being modified or viewed when the program crashed?

The Archive files are a failsafe way to find recipes, but cumbersome because they are every single revision made to it, sorted only by date.

BeerSmith uses Documents/BeerSmith2 as the default location for your recipes and customized profiles. When you find it, create and backup folder and copy the contents to it.

With BeerSmith open: File > Open File > Documents/[Backup Folder]

Inside this folder, you should find Recipes.bsmx, plus backups labeled 1-5. Clicking on any of them will open BeerSmith with a window of those recipe folders. I would start with Recipe5.bsmx and work backwards to find the most recent set. You can then copy and paste these recipes into the main BeerSmith recipe window.

Click to expand...

Hi,
  The "worst case" recovery process for a corrupt file in BeerSmith 2 is as follows:
  - Rename your "Documents/BeerSmith2" directory to something else like "OldBeerSmith" which saves your data
  - Make sure you have the latest version of BeerSmith 2 installed from the main download page
  - Restart BeerSmith2 - which will create a new BeerSmith 2 directory with the sample recipes in it
  - You will likely have to enter your registration key again
  - Once you have BeerSmith running again, use the Open command to open your old Recipe.bsmx file
    that is now in your "OldBeerSmith" directory  and then copy/paste any recipes you need into
    your new "My Recipes" folder
  - You can do the same with Equipment.bsmx, Hops.bsmx, etc... if you have added items beyond
    those that came with BeerSmith 2
  - If you can't open one of the files (Recipe.bsmx for example), you can also try opening the numbered
    backups (Recipe1.bsmx, Recipe2.bsmx, etc...) - these contain older copies of the original.
  - Let me know if you have any problems - and please keep your "OldBeerSmith" directory around
    (the one you renamed earlier) as it will have all of your data in it!

  NOTE: You can also recover recipes from the archive if you leave the archive directory in place.

Brad