Yesterday I wrote a little about how the Farm Files are saved in the program. Earlier, in May, I posted a blog about the auto-save feature and a new feature Vijay had added to the program, the ability to turn off the auto-save, allowing you to save changes when and where you would like. That posting can be found here.
As that post stated, the farm backup folder serves a sort of a safety net. I know there are times I have made changes in recipes or feeds and have messed up something complete and just want to start back at the point before I made any changes. In that case, I simply go into the Farms Backup folder, and select the last version (distinguishable by date/time stamp) and open that farm file.
While it is great that we have auto back up in case you get way off track when working in a farm–in practice working with these farm backups could be troublesome. One of the reasons this was true is that, once a backed up farm was opened, the program would automatically back up that backup! As a result, a copy of the backed up farm, with a new date/time stamp, would be added to the Current Farms folder. Therefore, besides having multiple copies of the same farm in Current Farms, which you generally don’t want, you now have the backup copy looking like the most recent version of the farm. Do this a few times and you can end up with lots of copies of the same farm in “Current Farms”, and a lot of time spent figuring out which is the right version and clearing out the others. I know that I have, at times, had 6 versions of the same farm in my current Farm files. I tend to make changes for my work on the manual or for the blog and don’t want the changes to be a “real” part of the farm record. It can be a mess when I try to do some real recipe work in that farm.
In the original post Vijay suggested:
To avoid these complications, we always recommended that, after opening a backup farm, this new copy of the farm file be deleted directly from the “Current Farms” folder using Windows Explorer. And to be extra safe, the original copy of the farm file could be, temporarily, moved from the “Current Farms” folder to another location before opening a backup. That way, there would be no risk of accidentally deleting the original version. Needless to say, this procedure is a hassle, but it also requires the client to be comfortable using Windows Explorer and manipulating files directly with it.
One other bit to note when reverting to an earlier version of the farm file: Any changes you have made in the Farm feeds, such as updating analysis information, price changes, etc are NOT in the older version of the Farm. You will need to key in those changes again.
