Participant

Question

FrameMaker Crashed and saved file with .492 appended.

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
May 27, 2025
4 replies
520 views

Didn't have time to capture the error message, which basically said an unrecoverable error occurred and FrameMaker had to quit. My file was saved as "filename.fm.492." It is 0 bytes in size. File cannot be opened, even if I remove the "492" appendage. Not too big of a deal. I lost about an hour of work. Has anyone else experienced this error with FrameMaker 2022 unstructured?

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi @stephen_9000:

Are you saving directly to Dropbox, or a similar cloud service with its own auto-backups?

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Matt-Tech Comm Tools

Community Expert

Hi Stephen, sorry to hear you're having destructive crashes! I have only seen that a few times in Fm 2022, but I have seen it.

Using Autosave options in the Preferences can be helpful and setting Backup on Save can be helpful but creates a lot of extra files to wade through. However, when you try to reopen your file after a crash, I would expect to see a message about the crash recovery file (.recover) that you can open and save off as a file to potentially save that hour of work that you did.

However, it sounds like you're getting files with gibberish extensions. When I've had those in the past, I've copied my content into a new doc and abandoned the one that keeps crashing.

-Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant

M

mk-will

Community Expert

Hi, @Matt-Tech Comm Tools ,

there should be recovery files, but when I am correct @stephen_9000 is using a network share for the FM files.

FM has only a very short time period to save recovery files and a network share is really slow compared to a local folder.

As there was a file named "filename.fm.492", I think FM tried to save recovery files, but ran out of time (0 bytes).

Best

Stephan

Matt-Tech Comm Tools

Community Expert

In my experience, the .fm.XXX files are all indicators of a problem, and not at all useable or salvageable.

In the few times I've seen them, I've abandoned the offending file and moved content to a new .fm.

In all cases (for me), the issue disappears

-Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

stephen: My file was saved as "filename.fm.492." It is 0 bytes in size.

If it's 0 bytes, it's empty, and there's nothing to open.

It may be too late, but when you open an existing document, FM automatically creates a .backup. file of it. So even if the in-process file gets totally trashed, you can at least get back to what the session started with…
…if you preserve/rename the .backup. file before doing anything else.
Else, if you just try to open a trashed .fm, FM will instantly and gleefully trash the prior .backup.

If you are on a journaling file system, you may have other recourse.

On auto-save, in a networked-FS situation, auto-save can't save any faster than a manual save. For documents that contain only referenced graphics, this shouldn't be a huge timesink. Embedded graphics are another matter, and another reason why they are worth avoiding.

Matt-Tech Comm Tools

Community Expert

An extremely rare correction to one of Bob's posts: The backup file is not created when you open an existing document, but rather created when FrameMaker saves a doc with the Automatic Backup on Save option enabled.

True, FrameMaker will instantly and gleefully delete the backup, but before trashing the backup, there's an appropriate dialog asking if gleeful deletion is what you want.

(FrameMaker may come with a few interesting "features" but I don't think sadistic destruction of content is one of 'em)

One other point to mention...when opening backups, recovers, and autosaves, the filename retains the appended extension (.backup, .recover, .autosave, if I recall correctly). It's at that point where I also do as Bob recommends, and save off that file for comparison if I have doubts about which version with which I'll want to go forward. The retained extension helps prevent overwriting of the original, but it does cause a bit of consternation and confusion if you're not looking closely at the extensions of your "recovered" files.

-Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

Matt: An extremely rare correction to one of Bob's posts…

Thanks for the correction.

I have to be mistaken from time to time so that I'm not mistaken for an AI…
…oh, wait.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Not that I recall - but crashes can happen for a variety of reasons. Didn't have the auto-save turned on?

S

stephen_9000Author

Participant

Autosave is an interesting issue. I assumed it was turned on by default, but apparently it is not. I recall that autosave affected performance when files include lots of graphics and are stored on a network.

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