Bizarre system restore behavior and C#

Ed Glunz

I'm not quite sure where to post this, but I figured these two groups would
be a good start.

I had a very nasty surprise this morning (7/26/05).

I had to do a system restore to a restore point I made about a week ago. I
had some VPN software that was screwing up my network, and even an uninstall
didn't fix it.

After doing the system restore, I noticed that every C# source file (*.cs)
that I had modified since the date of the restore point (7/18/05) had
reverted back to a date of 7/18. Worse, all the changes made since then had
disappeared.

I thought to myself "There's no way this is related to the system restore. I
must have only thought about making the changes and not actually made them."
But the changes were far too extensive to have been made only in my head. I
un-did the system restore and, lo and behold, all my *.cs files had the
correct dates on them, and the changes made since 7/18 were back.

Curiously, *.vb files were unaffected.

So, a couple of questions:

1) What the heck? Why is the system restore mechanism messing with source
files? Isn't it supposed to ignore changes made to document files?
2) How do I prevent this from happening again?

Bryan Slatner
Venture Group Enterprises, Inc.

Jul 26 '05 #1

Oliver Sturm

Ed Glunz wrote:

So, a couple of questions:

1) What the heck? Why is the system restore mechanism messing with source
files? Isn't it supposed to ignore changes made to document files?
Probably, I have no idea.
2) How do I prevent this from happening again?

Install and use a version control system. You should do this anyway,
even if you're not having problems with restore points. A very good and
free one is Subversion at http://subversion.tigris.org/ (great frontend
here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/), but there are lots of
alternatives if you don't like it. Every programmer should use a version
control system!
Oliver Sturm
--
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Jul 26 '05 #2