The right way to back up macdive?

[lbmigritor]

after adding 11 dives manually today, i had a crash of macdive. the crash occurred when i exported all my dives as UDCF. i do this to backup my logbook.

after the crash my latest added dives where gone. i thought, well i just use my recently exported UDCF divefile to add them again. i decided to first delete all my dives and then open the UDCF file i just created a few minutes earlier. Wrong! i had all my dives, but all the data was cramped. sites, gear, certifications, all gone! everything, like sites for example, where now a one-line description, useless. it would take days to fill out the right fields again.
so backing up through an UDCF export is NOT the right way.

then i thought, well let's check out the wiki. there it says this:
When you first upgrade to MacDive 2.x, it will create a backup of your original 1.x data. Navigate to this folder:
/Users/your username/Library/Application Support/MacDive/
You will see a couple of files.
* MacDive.sqlite - this is your current macdive 2 database.
* MacDive.sqlite.backup - this is your original 1.5.x data.
To revert to an old version of MacDive, simply delete MacDive.sqlite, and copy or rename MacDive.sqlite.backup to MacDive.sqlite. You should then be able to run the old version again.

this still works, but of course the backup file is a bit old now in my case (2011), so i missed a lot of dives.

then i used time machine to bring back the last macdive.sqlite file (1 hour old). this worked. i had my logbook back the way it was, except for the last dives i manually added, because the TM backup was an hour old.


This raised a question with me:
what is the best way to backup your macdive data?

could you add an auto backup just the way it worked as described on your wiki? which for example would create a backup everytime you opened the program?

[nick]

The files MacDive creates as backups are done when your data is upgraded, to allow you to revert to a previous version should you need to. They are not designed to take care of regular backup for you. That's what Time Machine is for. And you say you have time machine. Doesn't it back up every hour by default? As long as you save regularly (File -> Save), or MacDive auto saves when you quit, your data *is* being backed up regularly.

While it is unfortunate you lost a bunch of work, and I do apologise for the inconvenience, it's a good reminder that saving regularly is a good idea. The best I can do from here is take a look at the crash report if you still have it available and attempt to stop the issue from occurring again.

Also, backing up via UDCF is not ideal. It does not contain a lot of information that MacDive stores. The single best thing to back up is your actual MacDive data, which you can manually copy somewhere or you can let time machine deal with it. Either way - and I think this goes for a lot of applications - the native format is often going to be the best. Back that up and have a 100% complete save of your data, not the tiny subset that UDCF supports.