Problem when saving with the hard disk full

[repilo]

Hi, I'm using an automatic translator, sorry if this sounds rude.
I was editing a book and at one point I clicked on save and a pop-up window appeared saying that an error had occurred and that I had to close Sigil.
After several attempts, I ended up closing without saving the last changes.
Then I discovered that the hard disk had filled up and that was the cause of the problem.
I'm using Windows 10.
However, the worst thing is not that I lost the last changes, but that the epub has become unusable (it is less than half the size it was before, it can't be opened even if you rename the extension to zip). Although I have a copy from the day before.

So my request, if it's not too much trouble, is that when Sigil can't save the file because the hard disk is full, it throws a warning like: DISK FULL, EMPTY THE RECYCLING BIN! so that you don't panic and just go out to the operating system and delete useless files and problem solved.
Sorry if this sounds stupid, but it would have saved me a lot of trouble.

[KevinH]

Your OS should be telling you when there is no disk space left. The error messages from attempted file IO just indicate that the request failed. There is no equivalent for "disk full" just an io error, as there is for "running out of memory errors". Lacking disk space for temporary files will result in many types of file io errors and cache file errors none of which will tell Sigil that your disk is full. Your OS should be warning you of that.

Next, Sigil does NOT ever touch the epub you load until you try to "Save". There is no automatic save in Sigil for just that reason. So if you did not attempt a save, there is no way Sigil can or will corrupt that file. So if your epub was corrupted, that means your disk drive is probably corrupted. You should run the equivalent of fdisk on it to test and repair your disk drive.

If you plan on using Sigil in the longer term, might I suggest given how cheap disks are, you upgrade your system disk drive as Sigil makes active uses of caching and temporary files, even to Save as it must have enough space to write out every file to a folder that is then zipped up to create an epub.

[repilo]

Thanks KevinH.
Sigil is installed along with Windows on a half-empty SSD, so I imagine that's where it creates its temporary files, isn't it? There is no danger of that disk filling up.
The user documents are on another disk, a 1TB HD where I accumulate photos, videos, epub, etc... and a lot of rubbish (even deleted).

My problem comes from the fact that I don't want to empty the trash until it's absolutely necessary (to avoid previous bad experiences), and when the error message appears when saving in Sigil I panic because of the possible loss of work without anything in the error message to guide me about the cause.
I'll have to remember that the first thing I have to do is to look at the free space on the HD...

[KevinH]

And if you ever run into the same issue, try creating a Checkpoint (it will write to a repo inside the Sigil Preferences folder) instead of doing a Save, or use Save-As to save the epub someplace else that has space.

[repilo]

I had already wondered if the checkpoints would have helped me, but how could I access them if the epub, I don't know how, was corrupted and Sigil couldn't open it?
And what happens if I create checkpoints, then somehow lose the file and recover an older version from a backup? Can checkpoints be restored on an older backup as long as the file has the same name?

[KevinH]

If you ever run into an into acdisk space error on the drive you are saving to but the drive where Sigil is installed has room, making a Checkpoint could help. As would a Save-As. The corruption is caused by the full disk, not Sigil. Sigil becausevits workspace is on a drive with space, should properly create a Checkpoint. And yes you can restore from a Checkpoint over an even earlier version of the epub. The epub's metdata uuid dc:identifier is used as the key to identify uniquely an epub, as the name can change.

I regularly make checkpoints during the editing process especially just before running any Sigil tool that you can not easily revert any changes it may make, and before large find and replaces, etc. Being able to revert to an earlier Checkpoint is why we added that feature to Sigil in the first place.

Checkpoints create working git repositories with tags, rebuilding the entire epub at any commit with real git is always possible as well.