r83 Unable to save

I opened a project this morning in the r83 beta that I had created with the previous release (r82), made various changes and additions over the course of about an hour, testing and saving several times. Then, trying one more change and save, I got this message: "Failed to move uistate.xml.tmp to uistate.xml!"

Repeated attempts to save or save-as just prompted the same message to appear, and no save was ever completed. I finally closed Construct 2.

Even worse, not only was no save ever completed, but the file I had opened to start with had also disappeared! In other words, even the most recent successful save was gone. (It was the single-file type of project.) Luckily, I had a backup stored elsewhere (although that file does not reflect the state the project was in at the time this error happened, so I see no reason to attach it).

I understand r83 is a beta release and was just playing around with it. But I'm going to download and use the last stable version.

I had the same thing - were you by any chance running anything in the background like avg / tempfile/registry cleaning tools?

I believe it's what derped my project, also resulting in loss of and hour to so's work, and sadly one of my most productive, least procrastination filled hours.

I have no idea how this could possibly happen. The sequence of events when saving your project goes like this:

1. Save everything to file.xml.tmp

2. Delete file.xml

3. Rename file.xml.tmp to file.xml

This is to ensure if Construct 2 crashed while saving the project, the project is not at all modified: it only wrote to a temp file and has not changed any actual project data.

This error means step 3 failed. Renaming a file is one of the most basic disk operations possible, so the only way that could have failed is if the delete file in step 2 also failed so the filename is still taken, but again deleting a file is one of the most basic disk operations.

My best guess is your project is saved in a folder which you don't have full permission to access. Is your project in Documents, or another folder? My only other guess is you're out of disk space. I can't think what else would cause this. Also, what version and service pack of Windows are you using?

I didn't have anything else running that I know of, other than the web browser. I do have CCleaner on that machine. But I double-checked the settings on that. It is not supposed to load on start up, and I haven't run it manually in weeks. It's possible some other program started up in the background, but I don't know what it would be.

Ashley --

I was working at the time on a laptop with a fully updated Windows 7, and around 200 GB of free hard-drive space. I was saving to my Dropbox folder. I had saved several times there without any problem. Then after the problem, I went to my desktop computer, unplugged it from the Internet before booting it up, and then retrieved the old project file (from the previous day) that was in the Dropbox folder on that machine. In fact, there were two files -- the original and one backup. But after copying those elsewhere, I plugged in the Internet, and when Dropbox synced up, the files both disappeared (as of course I knew they would). And yes -- I have since set up the automatic backup to an alternate location, which is a very good feature to use, I now realize!

It could be, as JohnnySix suggests, that some other program in the background interfered with the save process, although I haven't experienced this with any other save process on that machine.

Anyway, I still love Construct 2!

UPDATE 3-26-12:

I got to thinking maybe frequent saving to the Dropbox folder was the problem. Not exactly sure how Dropbox does its thing, but I know it has to update the web copy after changes are made in the folder on the local drive. What if it happened to be doing that when another C2 save was attempted? Maybe that's not it, but the fact is, I was saving to the Dropbox folder when the problem occurred. Just to be safe, I decided not to do "working saves" to the Dropbox folder, but just to save there once at the end of a session. I used C2 (r83) a couple more hours yesterday, saving numerous times, and the problem in this report never repeated. I'm also doing auto-saves every 30 minutes to a different location than the project folder. Then the "end of session/ off-site" save to Dropbox.