How to recover corrupted queue?

[Xidus]

My computer crashed, apparently in the middle of altbinz autosaving the queue. Altbinz now opens with the Download queue page completely blank. Examining queue.abz in the misc folder I can see most of the queue was saved but the last few items were cut off. Is there any way to repair it, or am I stuck rebuilding the queue by hand?

[Gompy]

Maybe a reload/redownload of the NZB will help. When you checked Setup/Download "Already downloaded as paused" and Setup/Par2 " Recheck all PAR2 sets on start".
The parts you've downloaded so far will be marked as paused, the new ones will be downloaded then.
Downloaded parts are kept in the /temp/ folder.

If there is no decoding after that, maybe this will help you

http://www.altbinz.com/forum/index.php?topic=1489.msg4839#msg4839

Regards, Gompy
 

[therealjoeblow]

I've had the same problem several times.  Using Giganews with 200d of retention, I tend to throw lots of stuff into the queue fur 'future' consideration, and the queue is regularly 300mb+, with literally hundreds of items in it.  Rebuilding it from memory and saved .nzb files *can* be done, but when it's that large, it's painful!   

I found it *very* frustrating, and eventually I gave up hoping for alt.binz to reliably keep a backup of the queue and never wipe it out till it knows for sure that there is a good version stored.  Instead, now I use a backup program that backs up to .zip format (there are many available, any one will do, I use Genie Backup Manager).  It's scheduled to backup all of the files in "C:\Program Files\alt.binz\misc" every 4 hours, and only keep 6 versions so the backup folder doesn't grow too large.

Works like a charm, I've recovered from similar crashes with complete queue wipe-outs at least a half-a-dozen times now, and it only takes about 10 seconds to fix.

Sorry there's no easy answer to fix the broken queue.

Cheers,
The REAL Joe

[Hecks]

Keeping a 300 MB sized queue.abz file is just crazy.  It sounds like you're using the queue to simulate a header cache.  Really what's the point when you can save NZBs in a folder - super easy to monitor, and you won't be wasting any space, or just use the SEARCH engines or browse posting or review sites.  There are a gazillion better ways than this.

Nevertheless, Rdl has already said that 0.27.1 will have an improvement to how queue saving is handled.

[therealjoeblow]

I disagree - I think my method of queue and nzb management is very useful, the only hit is that you need quite a bit of memory (2gb works fine).

I browse headers in live newsgroups using x-news every few days.  If I see something interesting but not sure I want to download it just now, I create a nzb and import it to alt.binz as paused.  Then it's there as a reminder that I might want it some day, and alt.binz keeps it in the list and keeps updating it's age for me, so I can keep tabs on it.  Once in a while, I'll sort the list by date, and then look at the oldest ones, and if I really still want it and it's getting close to 200d, then I unpause it, otherwise I delete it.  Once it's downloaded, I cleanup the queue.  As I said, this works very well for keeping things under consideration if you can't necessarily make up your mind at the moment whether you want it or not.

If I don't import it, then I can't keep tabs on it's age because it's just a dumb file sitting in a folder, and I'll invariably forget about it.

Cheers,
/The REAL Joe

[Hecks]

I still think it's madness to be parking so much RAM for this kind of function when you are able to see the age of the file either by sorting against the creation date of the NZB in its folder in the Explorer tab) or, for extra convenience, double-clicking on it to import temporarily into Alt.Binz.

You could even use the Explorer tab to organise your NZBs by type, and much more.  I just don't think Alt.Binz is set up to do what you're doing, and that's why you're experiencing the problems you are.