Recipe updates lost, all old recipes duplicated.

I often create a recipe in BeerSmith and immediately brew it, but then wait until kegging to finally go back and enter my notes, actual gravities, etc. about the brewday.  Multiple times now, I have made such updates, only to have had them gone next time I reran the application.  Last weekend, I updated a recipe, saved it by the Save button, closed the tab in BeerSmith, reopened the recipe and confirmed my changes were in fact in there.  I then repeated for a second recipe.  Everything looked fine.  I closed the BeerSmith application.  A few seconds later, I restarted it just to check.  Two big problems:

1) My two updated recipes lost all of the updates I had just added, and

2) Every recipe in my database except the most recent one was exactly duplicated.  Yes, instead of the 34 recipes I had before, I have 67, all but one in pairs.

Okay, what am I doing wrong?  Thanks!

Okay, a complete reinstall, started new data file, everything reset to scratch, and it did it again.  Screw it, I'm going back to http://www.beertools.com/, which IS another option other than Promash, despite what the ads here say.  I liked BeerSmith's interface better, but at least BeerTools Pro doesn't drop data.

I hope you emailed Brad directly.  This is an unusual case.  I have beersmith installed on about 8 machines.  I tested on a number of operating systems including Windows 7, WIndows XP, Windows 8, Windows 2008 R2 Server, A hackintosh and Windows Server 2012.  I have manipulated recipes on all these machines and have never lost a recipe or any other files.  In all my installations, I accept all install defaults.  I also tend to log into the computer with an admin account. 

Beersmith is not inherently risky but as will all software there is a risk something is unique about your computer.  There is no unsolvable problem.  If you paid for a copy of BS2 already and don't want to just abandon it, try emailing Brad directly.  There is likely a solution for your troubles.

I had a similar problem. I think I was not closing the program and eventually getting logged off in Windows by other users. I'm having trust issues with Beersmith myself. Please post up some more opinions of Beer Tools if you can.

I'm not sure why there is a "Bugs/Support" forum here if Brad doesn't monitor it, but I'll send him email later if that's what's needed.  I'm stuck on Windows Vista, and everything else I run works fine, so I don't think it's a system problem.  It's something in the software itself, and since the data is stored as simple XML, I can't see that anything external could be causing this long-term behavior.

I'm not meaning to promote a competitor's product here; I was just posting a little too bluntly in frustration before.  No offense, I'm not going to post the virtues (or problems) of BeerTools Pro, beyond saying what I already did -- it does work, though it's interface is a bit odd.  It is best if you do your own research, rather than talking about it here, though.

Thanks. I am hoping to hear more about BeerTools from people who are familiar with Beersmith.


Good luck with your email, I've seen people say they haven't had any luck there either. I'd bet Brad has already read this post more than once though.

Just curious, what were the updates you made to the recipes?