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Another Copy May Be Running

jomebrew

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Grandmaster Brewer
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I've been dealing with this for a couple weeks now and, for the first time ever, lost a recipe I had recently created and brewed. I am already familiar with this issue and previously posted the solution for Mac instances some time back. Unfortunately, it wasn't an easy fix on my Windows 10.

My data directory is in my documents folder so it should be easy to find the inuse.lck file, right? No.  Wrong.

Turns out that my data directory was changed at some point to C:\Users\userx\AppData\Roaming\BeerSmith3. I didn't realize this had changed form my documents directory.  Deleting the lock file allowed me safely open beersmith3.  Now to move beersmith3 back to my documents folder and see what I have to recover...

Identifying your data directory is easy once beersmith3 is running. Simply click File / Change Documents Directory.

I decided to move it back to BeerSmith3 my documents directory. This is my procedure.
- close beersmith3
- navigate to the current data directory (in my case C:\Users\userx\AppData\Roaming\ where userx is you user name)
- right click on BeerSmith3 and select Send To -> Compressed folder
- Complete the process to create a zip file copy of the current Beersmith3 Folder
- if you are overwriting a previous folder like I did,
- navigate to the target folder. in my case, C:\Users\userx\Documents\
- right click on beersmith3 folder and select Send To -> Compresses Folder
- Complete the process to create a zip file copy of the Beersmith3 Folder
- Open beersmith3
- Select file /change documents  directory
- navigate to your preferred documents folder
- Create backup copy if you choose. I did and named it beersmith3-backup-12-10-20-beforedatafoldermove
- If moving to a beersmith3 folder with beersmith3 data, You will be prompted to use files in the new folder or overwrite files form the previous folder.  I chose overwrite.
- Beersmith3 will prompt to restart beersmith3 and will shut itself down
- Start Beersmith3 and confirm your recipes are there and it starts and shuts down safely

 
This has got to be one of the most annoying messages and there is no way around losing your work. I get this frequently with no opportunity to go to the other running version. I completely lost the vitals on a recipe just now. There needs to be some autosave or way to preserve your work. Basically, the app dies with no opportunity to recover your work. The only option is to save frequently, which sometimes I just do not do frequently enough. Whatever it is that is causing this needs to be fixed.
 
A few questions to try to help you out.

What operating system are you running?

What version of BeerSmith3 are you on?

Do you leave BeerSmith open for long periods of time?

While We may not have all the answers, the last update Brad made to BeerSmith3 changed how the program saves files to prevent such an error from occurring.  Running windoze 10, I have not experienced this error since updating the software to the latest version available. 

The program does automatically back itself up.  Brad has a Blog post describing how to recover files if you run into the type of error you are experiencing, so the information is available for recovery.
 
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