Scapple is beginning to lock up at start and close

Scapple
1

hi, so this started for me today but when i open up my daily scapple file, scapple freezes on the logo and never opens the file.

i thought this might be a corruption of my scapple file but luckily, i keep this document in my dropbox folder so i re-downloaded the scapple file and opened it and thank goodness, it opens… but then, when i try to close that file, it locks up and i have to kill the process.

is there anything i’m doing wrong here? can anyone take a look at my scapple file to see if it is indeed corrupt and if it is, if there’s any way to fix it and avoid corruption in the future?

thanks! happy new year everyone!

2

It’s hard to guess. You haven’t said what platform, what version of the platform OS, or what version of Scapple, among other things. That said, you’re welcome to send me the file and I’ll look at it.

contact me

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3

oh hey, thanks for responding!
oh i’m on win 10 on a pc and according to the autoupdate, on the latest version of scapple.
let me figure out how to send the scap file to you.
thanks again!

jin

4

here’s the scapple file in question. thanks!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GdqVgnpyZoG9GuFY5_OndoraMKhnOLdI/view?usp=sharing

5

As you are on Windows, first see if by disabling any anti-virus you have running is interfering.

BTW, file opens here fine on macOS 12.0.1 and Scapple 1.4. Impressive amount of work!

6

It opens here too, also on a Monterey Mac (M1 chip).

7

thank you both so much. so yeah, that version opens on mine too (it’s what i recovered from dropbox versioning but it still hangs scapple when i try to close. on your versions of scapple, can you close scapple without issue?

this was totally a non issue until today so i’m wondering what the heck changed on my machine… haven’t installed anything.

hmmmm… anyhoo, thanks for the confirmation!

8

Other things to narrow down your problem:

  1. Does the problem persists if you move the file off dropbox to an ordinary location on your harddriive?

  2. Do you have the same problem with any other scapple file or is it specific to this one?

  3. Can you recreate the problem by just creating a test Scapple file and then placing it in your dropbox area.

9

I doubt that would matter, since the .scap is a single file, not a folder full of hundreds of files, like a Scrivener project.

10

And yet, it’s a quick and easy test to completely rule out some odd interference (such as if Dropbox had a weird lock on the file.)

11

I’ve never heard of such a Dropbox lock, and I’d stop using it if I ever saw one.

12

Sometimes OS-level file locks go sideways…and IIRC most sync engines make use of file locks to ensure the file they are currently syncing doesn’t get changed out from underneath them.

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13

That would prevent me editing my files, which has never happened.

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14

a little update. so i’ve also noticed that right around when this scapple file started hanging, i started noticing other symptoms in win10 in general, a boot where the mouse is almost frozen and i can barely get to the taskbar to restart the machine or on another boot, the os hanged on shutdown… these weren’t constant symptoms but i did notice a cluster around which time this happened with the scap file too…

so i have a feeling this was probably an issue with corruption somewhere on either my boot drive or the drive where scapple or the scapple file resides. so i spent the day doing CHKDSK on my drives and i have a feeling that’s what it was. but things should be all cleared up now hopefully.

anyway, thank you much for the feedback and help. have a great rest of the year and all the best in your writings and endeavors in the year to come.

happy new year everybody!

1 Like
15

Good detective work. (Get a backup soon. Perhaps disk about to crash further?)

16

At least in Windows (but I thought it was also prevalent on modern *nix-derived systems) you can have read-only locks and read-write locks. For a typical sync engine, throwing a read-only lock on each file it needs to sync just long enough to sync the file (or at least copy the changed data into its buffer) is just a quick strategy to ensure the file is consistent— the lock would be placed, data copied, and lock removed before the user had time to notice. If you had a write queued up during that time it would either go in place before the read lock, or just as after.