Causes of a corrupt file
It would be really helpful to know what causes a corrupt file since the blog I was reading said typically you can’t un-corrupt them. Does anyone have a list or would you like to start one here? Thank you.
I am sorry, but there may be many causes. You will not find a list (although I have composed many lists for Captivate) because it is mostly due to either the used hardware/software setup (network setup, roaming profiles, firewall problems) or bad practice in the workflows. To all my trainees I try to warn about some bad practices (over using copy/paste being one of them), but feel totally unable to give you more specifications.
I did see your answer somewhere about power stabilisation. That is for sure geographically necessary in some countries, but I was smiling because totally irrelevant in my home country Belgium.
So frequent backups is really the best answer?
Is there ever a situation where once a file is published that it becomes corrupt when at one point it is ok? Or is it only unpublished files that start out ok and then may become corrupt?
Of all concerns that anyone posts about Captivate, the ONLY one that keeps me awake at night is corruption because it is unpredictable. Anything else I can work around.
I was working on interactive content and used an overlay file before the corruption occurred, and thought perhaps these were part of the problem, although it is only a wild guess.
Although I see Captivate as invaluable, I am seriously thinking of limiting the length of the published projects and creating the surveys as separate projects where I previously expected them to be within the same project. (I realize that surveys can’t be used as overlays.) Using this new methodology I would be doing branching outside of Captivate and using more projects than I originally intended. Thoughts?
Even without considering possible corruption issues, since I am unfortunately designing and developing at the same time, it might be best to branch outside of Captivate simply because then it would be very easy to change the branching without having to redo and republish a project, as I add more content when students have questions that were not previously addressed in the course projects. So maybe corruption is not as much an issue since the projects would be smaller with less work lost if they ever became corrupt.
I kind of like this new thought, treating projects as small programming objects. And thinking about this further, using variables, I could reuse these smaller projects in multiple areas as functions with different variables like I would in object-oriented programming. Make sense? I know, this probably makes no sense. Just thinking out loud and looking for guidance on the best direction to take. I probably should apologize to the community for such an open ended, unspecific question, especially since it doesn’t apply to the subject of this thread. Sorry.
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