Gdg project file corrupted (low priority, cause not known)

GDevelop general Bugs reports
1

Hi there,

I do not know how this happened, but opening my project today resulted in an error “Failed to read element name” in Gdevelop.

Of course I’m a little disappointed as the last backup I made was 2 days ago (much different) for potentially losing the latest project file, but I’m not sure what happened. Maybe there was a system error or something else that caused this.

Anyhow, I opened the file in Notepad++ and it reported the file corruption:

It has a lot of those, and that’s how the file ends also:

This is a report of a random/hard to track issue as I don’t know the cause. If you received the same gdevelop error, do you remember the possible cause? E.g. PC restart, power out, etc.

No autosave was made at this point.

Edit: There was an autosave file made 3 hours ago, but it features only null characters (even though it is the same size as the corrupted file, which does not feature only nulls!). Due to this it’s unlikely caused by a PC crash (3 hours between the autosave and my final corrupted save - too long for power issues).

2

It can’t be GDevelop that writes nul characters to your files, have you tested your harddrive health ?

3

Hi and thank you for your reply. This is an isolated incident, so I don’t suspect hardrive health issues, although if it starts appearing again with some other files, it would definitely cause concern. Honestly, I hope it’s not a hard drive issue (I have some files I don’t want missing there).

That said, I mentioned I have no idea what is the exact cause. It’s probably not system failure (e.g. power out), because that shouldn’t affect both the backup file (auto created hours before saved file) and saved file (those 2 files corrupted but nothing else corrupted in the same folder, e.g. manual file copy backups of older saves). There’s a lot of other possible causes and it’s pretty much impossible to be 100% sure. Date modified seems fine (just about when I saved and finished work), and an accidental access by another software (or even undetected virus) would likely change this date.

So, reported as a ‘random issue’, but if someone else gets the same (and I hope not, better for anyone) at least there’s some info.