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I have a very disturbing problem running LyX with Ubuntu 12.04 on my Dell Inspiron. Ever since I purchased this laptop and installed Ubuntu 12.04, it periodically freezes and nothing can be done to wake it up except a hard reset. That by itself is not a huge deal as I am always saving important files, etc.

However, three separate times now, when I am working in LyX and the freeze happens both the file that was open in LyX and the backup file (filename.lyx~) are completely destroyed. After reboot, the files still appear in the file system but are of size 0 kb.

Needless to say, this is a dire situation to encounter and requires constantly backing files on a flash disk or remote machine.

Has anyone else had this problem? Or, any ideas what might have happened to those files? Perhaps LyX backs them up somewhere else temporarily, and they are stuck there when the OS crashes?

I couldn't find a single crash log or any other useful information. But I will gladly post other technical details if they are of use in diagnosing the problem.

Thank you!

Dave B.
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2 Answers2

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I had some luck with a workaround that I thought I would share. Instead of letting LyX back up files in the present working directory (the default setting), I created a backup directory in ~/.lyx/ and changed LyX's default settings (under Tools > Preferences > Paths) to save backups there.

My laptop inevitably hard-froze again and the .lyx file I was working on was again destroyed. However, upon reboot I was able to restore the document from the new backup directory.

It's certainly not a perfect solution, but not a bad temporary fix and perhaps gives a little insight into the larger issue of how the files are being corrupted when the OS freezes.

Glutanimate
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Dave B.
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I had recently the same problem (Ubuntu 14.10, LyX 2.1.1). Let's say the name of the file is paper.lyx. I found that my work was saved not only in paper.lyx and paper.lyx.emergency, which were indeed empty after the crash (not entirely, though, 12Ko instead of 130), but also in the hidden file paper.lyx~.

I renamed this file paper2.lyx, and it was almost complete (only my very last update was missing).

Maurice Clerc
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