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Posted By: dfs4 mirc lost all settings - 13/11/12 11:08 AM
There was a forced pc shutdown. After that I started mirc and it was like I had just installed it.. all fields blank and all configuration gone. What is a possible explanation for this? is it some bug? or some hacking thing.. at least I hope not.
Posted By: Riamus2 Re: mirc lost all settings - 13/11/12 11:19 AM
Settings files can be corrupted if they are in use when a crash or forced shutdown happens. I know Khaled has seen people with that problem before, but I don't think he's found any way to prevent that from happening.
Posted By: gbz Re: mirc lost all settings - 13/11/12 12:20 PM
I know a few people who have experienced this too. It seems to me that this has occured more often in recent years though... maybe due to some change(s) in mIRC 7.x, or even in Windows 7 compared to XP.

Maybe it would be helpful if mIRC created regular (weekly) backups of the main settings file, like browsers do for bookmarks and such.

E.g. create an mirc.ini.bak file, then a week later, replace it with a new one... or even keep the last 3 or so backups.

That way users experiencing this issue could easily go back to a recent version of their settings, rather than having to redo everything.
Posted By: Khaled Re: mirc lost all settings - 13/11/12 05:57 PM
I used to receive emails quite often about this issue with older versions of mIRC but hardly ever see it reported now. Newer versions of mIRC should be, and have been designed to be, more robust when saving settings. They save settings to a new file, without touching the old one, verify that the new file has been saved correctly, and only then delete the old file, so there should not be any circumstances where all settings are lost. The only time I receive emails about loss of settings nowadays is when an anti-virus application has mistakenly deleted mIRC settings and/or files due to a false positive.

In the situation described in this post, where Windows itself crashes, the crash and the side-effects prior to the crash could affect running applications in many ways, including file and memory corruption. There is nothing mIRC, or any other application, can do to prevent loss of data in this type of situation. Regarding backups, this is really something that all users should do with backup software on a regular basis to protect exactly against this type of data loss.
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