All VB2010 files are corrupted

[bavelt]

I wanted te use an older version of my vb2010.net project.
It could not be opened. Inspection of the .vb files shows that they encrypted or scrambled. Normally you can open these files with a txt Editor. Now it shows only a lot of random characters.

The last 5 previous project versions: all the same. I had stored them on onedrive and in dropbox. And I had a backup on an external CD-rom from may 2023.
But also these files show that they are corrupted.

Now I am wondering what is happening. Ransomware? The file extensions are not changed. I did not get any message or e-mail about a ransom attack or claim.

Could there be something else that caused the encryption that I am not beware of?

Or are there perhaps tools that can analyze if the files ar infected or what has happened?

My virus scanner (Trend Micro) shows no viruses.

[jmcilhinney]

I'm not aware of anything specifically related to VS or VB that could possibly cause this. I'm tempted to move this thread because it doesn't seem like it's actually related to VB, but I'll leave it a little while, in case there's something that I'm not aware of.

What I will say is that this is another example of why proper source control should be used by every developer, no matter their level. Even if something did corrupt your files and you committed them, you'd still be able to roll back to any older committed state without issue and not lose too much work. That's assuming that the data is stored somewhere that its own files didn't suffer the same fate.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

You had copies not backups.

When you last copied over to onedrive/dropbox you destroyed your one and only set of backups.

I struggle to understand why so many coders here fail to implement a sufficient backup policy - and then stick to it.

Machine/software failures occur ALL the time and you need to have a method of dealing with the failure. Design a process that will survive any potential failure you wish to cater for. Take advice from the internet - Then do that thing and stick with it.

Only when you have recovered your data should we be talking about how the corruption was caused.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

I was caught out by an insufficiency in my own backups. I recently diverted onto a new VB6 project and started to create my VB6 desktop hole program. I cracked on and failed to submit it to github. all this happened within a period of two days. My laptop fried itself, blown capacitor and I can no longer access that project on the hopefully intact SSD.

I have probably lost that project due to failure to follow my own process which is normally to submit all my projects to github as I create them, I wanted to see how my code fared before I submitted it. Oh well, lesson learnt, lost two days work, move on.

ALL my other projects were on github, all restored to old lappie, coding continues.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Look at the dates of those last five project versions? Are they REALLY the last five, or did something copy over them? The file dates should be able to give you some clue, and this could be interesting.

My thinking is that you may really have five different project save files from five different dates, and now all appear corrupted, or you might have five copies of the same thing. If it's the latter, that's just unfortunate but fairly uninteresting. File corruption happens. It 'may' happen more with One Drive. I have heard rumors of files going missing, so files getting corrupted wouldn't be all that far different. It's just rumors, though, so it's quite unreliable. However, very rare events are certain given enough iterations. For example, Access mdb files can become corrupted in weird and wonderful ways. It's so rare that Access is widely used, but it DOES happen.

If the file dates suggest that all your saved projects are different, and not copies of the same thing, then this could be more interesting. Not in a good way, of course, but more interesting. You might try copying the files onto a flash drive and opening them on a different computer. This almost certainly will not work, but it's a fairly easy test to perform. Another thing to do is to look at some other files on the same media (OneDrive, or whatever) and see whether or not those are corrupted as well. Basically, you're trying to figure out if, "everything in this location got corrupted", or if it was just specific types of files or specific folders. Opening from a different computer might tell you whether it is something about your current system or the transfer process.

None of that seems likely to reveal anything spectacular, but all of that would gain more insight into the issue.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

I have a regular rant about Microsoft's incapability to synchronise things properly. To summarise, Microsoft's previous attempts to provide synchronisation tools has regularly and sometimes catastrophically failed. Don't use them.