Syntax Folder Load Issue When Used in Win2K Offline Drive

[Hangtime79]

I looked through the different areas of the site for an answer and found none, so I am posting here.

Environment:
Textpad 4.7.2
Windows 2000
Recreate by mapping a drive to another computer, right click on drive and click "Make Avaliable Offline", sever the connection to that computer (turn off the other computer, remove the network link from either computer, use your imagination )

Background: About six months ago I lost my own Clip Library (TCL files) definitions due to a hard drive failure and spent about a week trying to rebuild them. Since at my company, we have our own network drive I decided to change my default Clip Library files folder to Y:\ which maps to \\servername\employeeid. This was good for me because I then could get regular backups of my clip libraries and thus would never lose them again. That said, I still needed my work files while on the road so I set up my drive to Make Avaliable Offline thus my Y: drive still appears when I am on the road and at home.

Problem: Now that my Clip Library files reside in this drive letter that's made avaliable offline, my personal definitions will not load (the default ones are) when I am not connected to the network. However, as soon as I reconnect to my office network and restart Textpad the clip library pane will load all the Clip Library files including my personal ones from the Y: drive. I have tried to use both a UNC path and the drive letter path to get the syntax folder to load with no avail.

I would prefer not to keep my Clip Library files on my local drive because of the possibility of loss. I don't quite understand why Textpad can not load the Y: drive Clip Library files when operating in Offline mode especially since my default folder is the Y:\ drive and when I use the Open command it will automatically open the offline drive folder. Any workarounds or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Grant

[MudGuard]

However, as soon as I reconnect to my office network and restart Textpad the clip library pane will load all the syntaxes including my personal ones from the Y: drive.

Strange. Why would the clip library load syntax files? It should load clip library files (*.tcl), not syntax files (*.syn)

Are you sure the clip library loads syntax files?

[Hangtime79]

My fault for actually trying to post this early on a Saturday. I meant Clip Library files not syntaxes MudGuard. I changed the original message. Thanks for catching that one for me.

[Bob Hansen]

Can you try something like this?
===========================
Keep user defined clip library, syntax, etc. files in both locations.

Default location in TextPad is on local drive.

Start TextPad with a shortcut that calls some type of batch file. Generic contents:
1. If Server Drive is available, copy files from server to local drive.
2. Start TextPad
3. When TextPad closes, copy files from local drive to Server Drive.
=============================
This way, When you start from any machine, the latest changes will be copied from the server to your machine. And when you close TextPad, all of your latests changes will be copied to the server.

If the server is not available, you will still have the most recent copies on your machine. Copies on server will protect you if your machine crashes again. And server probably has a daily backup so your files have an additional backup copy.
===================
Since this is based on starting TextPad from a shortcut that calls a batch file, you may want to consider doing the copy process from the server at login time so that the latest files will be on the local machine if you use double-click or context menus to launch TextPad from Explorer, etc. (Then you would need another process to copy from local to server when you logout?)

[Hangtime79]

That makes sense Bob, I may go ahead and do that. I just think that the loading of the Clip Libraries is odd. In my view there should be no difference when loading from an Offline Drive and a Network Drive.