I’ve been working on an HMI application recently (RSView ME). At the end of the day I saved everything, closed the project, then used Application Manager to backup the application to an .apa file and store it on the server.

This morning I opened the local copy of the application, and a significant portion of the work I had done yesteday was “undone”. It was only one of the displays, but all of the changes were missing. I restored a copy of the backup, and it was the same there. Now I’m pretty paranoid about saving my work, so I probably saved that display about 50 times yesterday, and it was definitely saving somewhere. The question was, where?

Here’s what I did to get myself into this problem:

1. Started by copying one display (let’s say “A”) to make a new one (let’s say “B”).
2. I then renamed the duplicate (let’s say from “B” to “C”). I probably didn’t close the display before renaming it (which might have caused the problem).
3. I made all of my changes to the display, saving along the way.

It turns out that the changes I made were being saved against “B”, not “C” even though “B” didn’t really exist anymore. I was able to recover from this problem with the following procedure:

1. Close the application (but leave RSView Studio open if you want)
2. Goto C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\RSView Enterprise\ME\HMI projects\[proj-name]\Gfx
3. Rename C.Gfx to D.Gfx
4. Rename B.Gfx to C.Gfx
5. Open the application again in RSView Studio. The changes should be restored.

I hope that helps someone one day.