Recover files - placing new EPW will remove all files with the folder

Hi there,

I am wondering if anyone has encountered the situation I am having now. I selected df to place the modified EPW on my desktop. But it seems df is erasing all files to place the EPW. I’m not able to recover the files now. Any ideas?

M. Najjar

Hi @mnajjar ,

I’m sorry to say that overwriting a file/folder like that means that the original data is gone. What component did you use? The “DF Write EPW” component only seems to write a single file and not a whole folder. If you used a different component, maybe we can adjust this behavior so that this does not happen again.

Thank you @chris for you response.

I used RunUWG component. It removed all the files on the desktop and the files within the folders located on the desktop. I didn’t expect this behavior. I hope this would be fixed. For me, I will be more careful in the next time.

Hi @mnajjar ,

I’m really sorry about this. We use a standard practice of clearing out simulation folders before we run simulations since, usually, those folders will contain files from a previous simulation that we want to overwrite. If we don’t remove them, the simulation might not be able to run (or worse) the simulation fails and we end up accidentally loading the results from the old simulation and you think that they are for the new simulation.

Let me think about whether there’s a better way to reconcile this against the fact that people may plug important folders in for their simulation folders that we really don’t want to overwrite. This is the first time I have seen a report like this and, now that I know that this happens, maybe we can find a better solution.

@mnajjar ,

Thinking through this, I think the reason why this UWG case is the first time that we’ve accidentally deleted an important folder is that we are usually running simulations in a sub-directory of the main simulation folder and so we only need to clean that sub-directory instead of the whole simulation folder. The UWG case is different in that we’re only generating two files (the json and the morphed epw) so there’s really no need for to use a sub-directory and we just need to be sure those two files are overwritten.

Looking at the latest UWG component, we usually don’t delete any of the files in the folder when all that we are doing is writing out the json:

So it makes sense for us to use the same practice when we generate the EPW with the UWG. I just made this change now and this should prevent this case from happening in the future:

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention, @mnajjar and I’m really sorry, again, that this happened.

Thank you, @chris.
Well, this indicates one problem I have; it seems I am so messy to the extent that I am the first to complain about this!

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