Hi to all,
I opened a previously-developed raw file in RawTharapee and reset it to neutral to play around with the LAB module.
My goal was just to better understand that module, and I had no intention of keeping the changes.
But, Murphy’s law and all, I accidently went back to the file browser and… my previous version was overwritten.
Luckily for me, the previously-developped raw was not an important image, but nonetheless, two questions:
Is it possible to get the previous version back (i.e., its associated .pp3 file)?
If not, might it be a good idea to add some mechanism in RawTherapee to make such accidents repairable?
Thanks to all in advance!
Is it possible to get the previous version back (i.e., its associated .pp3 file)?
If not, might it be a good idea to add some mechanism in RawTherapee to make such accidents repairable?
No, any edit is immediately stored in the pp3 after you close the image and the history is not kept. I know this is accident-prone, but that’s the current state of affairs unfortunately. There have been multiple discussions and suggestions to have a persistent history, but so far no one on the RT team is devoted to make that happen.
Thanks, Thanatomanic, for your response.
I was pretty sure that the answer would indeed be no and am furthermore not surprised that the issue has come up before.
Although a persistent history would be the home run-cool thing, frankly, a simple closing confirmation dialogue, “Would you like to keep the changes made to the file? [Yes] [No]”, would largely suffice.
Anyhoo, thanks again and happy shooting to you!
If you’re editing an image and go back to the File browser, the processing you’ve just done is updated in the pp3.
If it happens that you’re lucky and immediately realize that wasn’t what you wanted, just go back to the Editor tab (click on the Editor tab) and then click on the first entry of the History, so you will go back to your original processing.
If you realize the mistake when you have edited another image after that one, then the original processing is lost.
I find the persistent snapshots in ART an effective solution.
To be sure, when I export, I take a snapshot and give it a name.
Perhaps other solution could be better, but this one has the great advantage to exist.
Perhaps some dev could borrow the code from ART
If you’re on a Linux or FreeBSD system, you can leverage the ZFS filesystem with its automatic snapshotting capability. For example, you can have it make a snapshot of your files every 5 minutes. Then you can simply revert to an older version through the hidden .zfs directory.
Since this approach works on the filesystem level, it will cover all of your files, no matter if an app supports version history or not. It can resemble a version control system (e.g. git).
Even if you’re on Windows, you can set up a Linux / FreeBSD file server with Samba and ZFS and host your work on it.
ZFS snapshot tutorial (for FreeBSD, but something similar can be done on Ubuntu or your preferred Linux distro):
Automated snapshots can consume your storage space, so make sure to clean up e.g. 1 week old ones using cron and this script:
ZFS works best with ECC RAM to prevent memory caused data corruption. It’s best if you use a server-grade motherboard with ECC RAM support, but it’s not required.