Has anyone else experienced amnesia with 2012b?

I am running 2012b on Windows XP 5.1. I heavily edited a script yesterday, and when I started Matlab today: 1) the m-file in question was not open in the editor, 2) when I opened the m-file using the Matlab gui, none of my edits were there, 3) the command history shows NO activity from yesterday although it does for the day before, and 4) when I opened the m-file from the folder in which it was saved, the edits were all there.

Has anyone else run across this bug? Any tips in preventing this Matlab amnesia?

[Andreas Goser]

Can you look at the time stamp of the .m file and the respective .asv file in the Windows Explorer and also compare with the time of your last edit?

[Andreas Goser]

And as of (different) editing issues in the past: Is the file located on a network drive or has the path special characters in it?

[ANetTow]

I see no .asv files (which concerns me) and when looking in the Windows directory, the time stamp on the m-file was what I expected it to be: about 5:00pm on the day Matlab seems to have lost.

The files as well as Matlab are all on my desktop. No networking problems or file paths with strange characters..

Answer 1

[Jan]

Do I understand correctly: When you open the M-file using the Matlab GUI, the edits are not existing, but they are if you open the file "from the folder", which means using the file browser of the operating system? This sounds magic. Even if Matlab has forgotten anything, for displaying the file it has to read the data from the disk. And then it cannot be explained, why the contents of the file depends on the method you open it.

Whenever magic appears in Matlab, simple deterministic causes could be found until today. Therefore I dare to guess, that you do not open the same file, but different files. Please check this 4 or 5 times again.

On the other hand I can believe that the history is missing a day. This could be caused by a simple crash. We had this e.g. in 2011b when a AudioPlayer object exists and Matlab tries to delete it automatically at shutdown. Although this happened in a phase where error messages could not be seen in the command line anymore, the error beep revealed that there is a problem.

[ANetTow]

I have checked the file multiple times now, and cannot repeat the problem.

Perhaps the missing history is due to a crash, but I find no crash dump files for the date in question when I use:

tempdir

I thought it was weird and that I should report it in case anyone else has the same problem.

Answer 2

[Jason Ross]

Are you using Roaming Profiles on your domain? It's possible that they became out of sync and the information was lost when they re-synced. There have been a number of issues over time where this would happen for one reason or another :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840998

If you search for "Roaming Profile missing files" or "roaming profile corruption" there are a variety of things that can go wrong.

If you check the Event Viewer on your PC, look for messages relating to a profile having to be re-downloaded or something similar.

[ANetTow]

It's a stand-alone computer, so no roaming profile.

[Image Analyst]

So you're saying that you don't have a C:\Users\yourName\AppData\Roaming\MathWorks\MATLAB folder on your computer like other Windows 7 users?