Corrupt DYN file, version OK

Revit
1

When reopening the file, using the same version of Dynamo / Revit that it was created in, same machine, got the error:
Error opening corrupted file: zzz.dyn

Using Revit 2020.2 + Dynamo Build 2.3.0.5885

I was able to recover the file from the backup folder, but this behaviour is quite annoying and happened twice over the past couple of days.

  • attached are two files, before and after corruption. I opened the corrupt file with a text editor and it’s empty/ full of nulls
  • I am saving the files in a cloud storage PCloud (Dropbox-like)
  • besides becoming corrupt, one of the packages got magically uninstalled (Bimorph in this case)
  • there are a couple of conflicts between addins / packages that I am ignoring, involving RhinoBEAM and RestSharp.

(corrupt)DYN_Topo from CAD text_D2.3.0.dyn (43.4 KB)
(good)DYN_Topo from CAD text_D2.3.0.dyn (40.3 KB)

Curious if anyone else has encountered this / ideas on what might be causing this / how to prevent file corruption from happening.

2

Hello @raster_madre,

When opening up the .DYN files in Notepad, it appears your corrupt one is just a series of tabs, as shown in the image below:

image
image1823×715 197 KB

Do you take a certain action that will make this happen, or, is there a crash pop-up? If we have reproducible steps then it’s a lot easier for us to diagnose! :slight_smile:

@Michael_Kirschner2 @Aparajit_Pratap - Any ideas why this may be happening?

3

@raster_madre could you describe the steps that led to the generation of the corrupt file vs. the good file?

4

Thanks, @solamour , @Aparajit_Pratap

Restarted the machine a couple of times until I could get this to happen again.

Looks like it has nothing to do with Dynamo itself but with the cloud storage that I’m using.

  • ran and saved the file
  • checked in notepad - file OK
  • restarted machine
  • checked the file in notepad - empty
2 Likes
5

Good to know there is breadcrumbs and happy to hear that it isn’t Dynamo :slight_smile:

Are you able to investigate with the Cloud Storage service why they are overwriting the file format data?

6

I did immediately jump to conclusions and blame it on Dynamo :flushed: sorry!

Yes sure, I’ll sort it out with the cloud people.

1 Like
7

No worries! Just glad you have a pathway towards a solution :slight_smile:

8

Several cloud storage solutions which allow multi-user access (ie: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive) have issue with Dynamo graphs due to user A opening in player while user B edits the file, often due to concurrent access but sometimes it’s an infosec thing (as far as windows is concerned you’re running random code from the internet every time you open those DYN files off the cloud). Cloud mirrored devices (ie: Panzura) also struggle for the same reasons.

Mirroring onto the cloud would avoid those issues (similar to how GitHub works), but that could cause other workflow problems for you. Perhaps ‘work local and copy to could periodically’ is the best bet.

1 Like