Auto-saved sessions behavior

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

When I hit the "max auto-saved sessions" I was expecting BC3 to discard the oldest sessions.

Instead it seems to discard the latest in aphabetical order.

Thanks a lot for this wonderful software!

[Aaron]

Hello Gianni,

I just attempted to reproduce this. The Auto-saved Sessions folder shows the sessions in order of when they were last used (Days Ago), and deletes the oldest first. Are your sessions in alphabetic order and chronological order coincidentally? You should see it delete the oldest first.

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

Hi Aaron,

very strange!

I have only one folder into the "Auto-saved sessions" folder: is the "More than 6 days ago" folder into which there are all my sessions in alphabetical order (grouped by type: folder sessions appears first, file sessions appears last).

If I do a compare now, that session become the first of this list in any case.

If I exit BC3 then reopen it, the sessions are rearranged in alpha order in the way just described.

I'm sure it is always been so.

I use BC3 every day.

>Are your sessions in alphabetic order and chronological order coincidentally?
No. I have done a test now to verify this.

Looking at Options, nothing seems to be related to this behavior, apart from:
General, Home View
[x] Include session management
100 Max auto-saved sessions

[Aaron]

Hello,

Do you have a Last Modified timestamp showing in below the Description box (above the Open, Delete, Save As buttons) of each Auto-saved session?

Are you using the latest release of BC3 (3.1.7). You can check for updates under the Help menu, or download the newest version here:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

Hi Aaron,

I'm using the latest version, 3.1.7 build 10865.

>Do you have a Last Modified timestamp showing in below the Description box (above the Open, Delete, Save As buttons) of each Auto-saved session?

No and I have never seen that!

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

Hi Aaron,

I have found the culprit, it is a "Regional options", "Standards and formats" question.
I'm Italian and my Windows XP and the "Regional options" speak Italian.
If I change language in "Standards and formats" to English all begin to behave correctly, as you describe.

Can you fix this in a future patch/release?

[Aaron]

Hello,

We actually fixed that roughly a year ago in 3.0.7. But any sessions saved with that or older versions would still have the older style dating mechanism that would cause problems. Are some of your sessions roughly a year old?

Also, could you email us your support.zip to [email protected] ? This way we could verify your sessions and settings to make sure this is the issue you are running into.
Please include a link back to this forum post in the email.

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

Hi Aaron,

I have uninstalled BC3 and removed the program folder.
Then I have reinstalled it with default settings and no saved sessions at all.
Some playing with it.
The problem is the same.
And changing language to English in Windows regional settings seems to solve.

I have emailed you a support request.

[Michael Bulgrien]

But did you empty the "%appdata%\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare 3" folder?

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

Hi Michael,

I don't remember where I have read the tip, I have moved the "%appdata%\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare 3" folder content into the BC3 program folder to make it "portable" many month ago.

[Erik]

Hi Gianni,

Thanks for the email. It turns out that the issue is the time separator. Almost all countries use ":" except Italy which uses ".". We will fix this issue as soon as possible. For now, changing your time format in your regional options would prevent session modified times from being saved in an unsupported format.

[Gianni1962PiacenzaIT]

Thanks a lot Aaron and Erik!