No files can be recovered from this session now

No files can be recovered from this session now

[no-reply]

Hi,
my question is probably very common, but please read this message to the 
end.

My computer crashed (not due to emacs) while I have lots of open buffers 
in emacs,
so I reboot and launch emacs, then "Recover session". But when typing 
C-c C-c
on the latest .saves-* file, I get the message
 "No files can be recovered from this session now"

I could not find ANY information on what this could mean :

- searching the archive of this very list for this phrase gives:
  "No document matching your query."
- a google search gives about 20 references
  which are completely irrelevent for the common user.
  (with stack tracebacks,  *.el and other configuration files, etc.)

So :
 - what does (or : can) it mean ?
   (Under the first, most basic, simple and frequent hyopthesis that 
"all is working well")

One innocent answer might be :
 - there are no unsaved files ! All has been saved before the crash
   (and the #...# files removed),  no file has thereafter been modified.

But then :
- why do I have the ".saves-*" file, nonempty
 (listing all my open buffers, normal and #...# filenames),
 with modification/creation date just the time of the crash ?
 Is this ".saves-" file not updated whenever a file has successfully 
been saved
  and not yet modified again ?

And most of all :
- why is the message so cryptic (instead of saying "no backup files found")
  and there is not a little more explicit help on all of this ?

I imagined lots of more complicated answers that could explain this message
before doing " ll `cat ~/.em*/.sav*` " to see that none of the #files# 
existed.
(Did I choose not the latest .saves- file ? because another error also 
came up:
"recover-file: Auto-save file 
/home/user/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/#.saves-20606-localhost~# not current".
[the function "recover-file" went by default into this strange hidden 
subdirectory !]
- did I "loose all" because I did not "recover-session" right at the 
first launch of emacs ?...)

Thanks in advance,

    Fred

Re: No files can be recovered from this session now

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 12:29:16 -0400
> From: no-reply@bestof-inter.net
> 
> My computer crashed (not due to emacs) while I have lots of open buffers 
> in emacs,
> so I reboot and launch emacs, then "Recover session". But when typing 
> C-c C-c
> on the latest .saves-* file, I get the message
>  "No files can be recovered from this session now"
> 
> I could not find ANY information on what this could mean :

It means that Emacs cannot recover any files from that session.

> One innocent answer might be :
>  - there are no unsaved files ! All has been saved before the crash
>    (and the #...# files removed),  no file has thereafter been modified.

That's one possibility, yes.

Another, worse, possibility is that there were unsaved files before
the crash, but their auto-save files are gone (e.g., because the
computer restart procedure erased them).  Try looking in the various
lost+found directories.

> But then :
> - why do I have the ".saves-*" file, nonempty
>  (listing all my open buffers, normal and #...# filenames),
>  with modification/creation date just the time of the crash ?

If some of these files are precious to you, you should try looking
for them.

>  Is this ".saves-" file not updated whenever a file has successfully 
> been saved and not yet modified again ?

It could be, but probably the files were simply erased as I mentioned
above.

> "recover-file: Auto-save file 
> /home/user/.emacs.d/auto-save-list/#.saves-20606-localhost~# not current".
> [the function "recover-file" went by default into this strange hidden 
> subdirectory !]

It's not strange: that's where Emacs saves these files.  See the
variable `auto-save-list-file-prefix'.