Re: How can a preview copy of StoryServer  be obtained?

Hi Mark!  I am so happy to hear that you have beaten the cancer and are on the mend so well!  Great to know you are still monitoring these groups.  We are lucky to have you here.

I only have a moment to reply so I'll just summarize.

Ecco has a lot of quirks and with EE running there are even more.  I have never felt that confident about Ecco in terms of protecting data from loss.  There is just something about it that seems fragile.  And it's not only the inner workings that seem fragile it's also the way it makes it easy for the user to destroy data unintentionally through regular use.  It's so easy to delete items in one context, for example when you didn't realize they were needed in another context.  Ecco is great at creating contexts, but that is also that potential pitfall.

Also at least since I have been using EE, I get occasional nasty messages usually involving some kind of file "corruption."  Of course the definition of corruption is critical to understand.  It does not necessarily mean data loss, at least not if you address it as soon as it happens.

I have been whittling down on these potential data loss things for many years.  One of the first things I did was ask Slang for the "lock" feature for items.  The idea was to try to minimize the accidental deletion of items I referred to above.  As a matter of fact I think that was my first EE feature request (and I was blown away when Slang did it so fast!).

Later I requested other features such as automatically checking regularly to see if a file is corrupted and not automatically saving a (and overwriting an existing) file if file corruption is detected. These features happen automatically with EE and most users probably don't even know they exist.  But they have been a godsend for me because most importantly they make it much harder for your file to be corrupted without your knowledge.  Slang also added other corruption protection that isn't visible but can reduce the problems in some cases including such things as breaking the ~16k folder item limits and providing a corruption "fix" feature (which by the way never fixed anything for me until recently... I found out that it does work for a certain specific type of "corruption" which I seem to be getting regularly now after adding some new scripts.

Next, I have an excellent and deep backup routine in case I get into real trouble.

Next I have built in some safeguards via scripting to reduce the incidents of actions that I know cause problems for my particular files.

And finally, I have just dealt with so many different kinds of issues for so many years, I never see anything I can't deal with anymore.  I'm not saying I can fix and file, I am mostly saying that I have so many safeguards that it's unlikely things will get bad enough so I can't fix them.  I don't worry about it much anymore although it can be a major inconvenience sometimes.

Unfortunately though, I've always thought that the potential for at least annoying and possibly data destroying problems is the most disappointing part of Ecco,  A lot of it has to do with its 16bit limitations.  If that goes away there is at least the possibility of not being so anxious about seeing this all the time... which I agree would be a real stress reliever.  The problems always seem to happen when I need Ecco the most and have the least time to deal with them.

I am glad to see you Mark.  Keep up the great work on your health!