Is it possible to recover a Mathcad file from a file like MFCXXX?

[-MFra-]

Hi all!

When saving a 25MB mathcad file, Windows creates a temporary file with a name whose first three letters are MFC followed by 4 hexadecimal digits and 0MB size. When the saving is finished, it is automatically deleted. Moreover, if during the saving (which takes several minutes) the operation is disturbed in some way, it happens that the content of the original file is reset and stored in the new MFCXXXX file of the TEMP type, which, then, results unrecoverable. If you open this MFCXXXX file with a text editor, you can access the file. Wanting to recover the file, what are the changes to be made to the opened file with a text editor, and how to change its extension and then save it again with the xmcd extension? Is it possible?

Currently I save the files with the name of my liking to which I add the date of the day, so that, if I lose the file, I always have the copy of the previous day. I ask the question in case I want to recover the lost file in the aforementioned way.

[terryhendicott]

Hi,

To change the name of an extension that has a default program association in windows you need to do it from the command prompt using the "rename" command.

Cheers

[LucMeekes]

(Forgot to read the post below, before submitting a reaction)

[-MFra-]

Hi,

My fundamental problem is not so much the saving of the file (which seems simple), as the recovery of the original worksheet created with mathcad and stored automatically (clearly must be mathcad that follows this procedure and not windows, contrary to what I have written in the previous post) in the MFCXXXX file.

[terryhendicott]

Hi,

Can you enclose one of the files?

Cheers

[-MFra-]

Hi,

You want that I published a file on which I'm working on for years?!?!?

[Werner_E]

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@-MFra- wrote:

Hi,

You want that I published a file on which I'm working on for years?!?!?

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I guess Terry is not interested in the content of your file but interested in helping you.

He won't be much disappointed if you don't post that file.

[-MFra-]

I'm sorry but I can not please Terry.

 I would like to know if it is normal what I said earlier, namely, that when you save a worksheet in the Mathcad 15 environment, it creates a temporary file of the type MFCXXXX.temp. When you open the folder containing the worksheet with "files explore", you can see the presence of the temporary file. Is this normal or is it a problem of my computer?

Thank you.

[Werner_E · Accepted solution]

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@-MFra- wrote:

I'm sorry but I can not please Terry.

 I would like to know if it is normal what I said earlier, namely, that when you save a worksheet in the Mathcad 15 environment, it creates a temporary file of the type MFCXXXX.temp. When you open the folder containing the worksheet with "files explore", you can see the presence of the temporary file. Is this normal or is it a problem of my computer?

Thank you.

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I seldom see those MFCxxxx.tmp files as saving a Mathcad worksheet usually is done in fractions of a second.

I may see it when a worksheet needs longer for saving due to its length or because it needs longer for recalculating the worksheet.

When those tmp files remain it usually means that saving went wrong.

As far as I remember those files usually have zero byte length and contain no information but I don't have a specimen at hand to check.

Alt least we can say that usually you should never see those tmp files.

[-MFra-]

Thanks Werner, that's what I wanted to know. However have you never opened such a file, for example, with "word pad"? I happened to open one of these files with wordpad. It, up to a certain point, was regular. But from about half of the file on, it had a very long "tail" consisting of alphanumeric characters as if they were bitmaps. if I remember correctly, I deleted the incomprehensible lines and substituted the last line with the ones of a normal worksheet, then, after changing the extension from .temp to xmcd, it was possible to open it with MATHCAD.

[Werner_E]

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@-MFra- wrote:

Thanks Werner, that's what I wanted to know. However have you never opened such a file, for example, with "word pad"? I happened to open one of these files with wordpad. It, up to a certain point, was regular. But from about half of the file on, it had a very long "tail" consisting of alphanumeric characters as if they were bitmaps. if I remember correctly, I deleted the incomprehensible lines and substituted the last line with the ones of a normal worksheet, then, after changing the extension from .temp to xmcd, it was possible to open it with MATHCAD.

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I guess most of the times one of those files were left on my HD because of a failing save it had zero bytes (being the first time a file was saved)..

I thought that those temp file simply are the renamed older version of the file being saved but I never digged into it for more detail. I guess that exactly was the reason why Terry asked you to send a specimen of such a file to give us the opportunity to further investigate.

If you have one of those temp files which is not zero bytes in length - what happens if you simply rename it to something like test.xmcd without changing its content and try to open it with Mathcad?

[-MFra-]

Things like that have happened to me too as I have already said. In practice it happens that if, while saving the Mathcad file, there is some external cause that disturbs this action, then there is the possibility that an irreversible error occurs. Instantly the original file is reset and the content is transferred to a new file with the temp extension. If you simply change the file extension from temp to xmcd, you can not access it since the error was also stored in it.  Instead, by making some corrections, it can be accessed. I do not want to attach such a file because all Mathcad users have such files, just look for MFC and you'll see how many will "emerge".

[Werner_E]

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@-MFra- wrote:

I do not want to attach such a file because all Mathcad users have such files,

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Not me, as I would delete them when they are left over (which doesn't happen that often for me) 😉

BTW, I was wrong explaining how those file are created. They are not the old, previous versions as I mistakenly wrote, but - on contrary - the new ones.

When a file is saved, its saved to a MCFxxxx.tmp file first and when this is possible without any failure, the old version of the Mathcad-file is overwritten with this tmp file (rather: the tmp file is renamed). This is done to avoid that, if saving goes wrong, the user is left with his old version partially overwritten by a broken new version and so no working version at all. He should at least keep the previous saved version of the file - thats the philosophy.

As we know, the mechanism isn't perfect and occasionally most users have lost a Mathcad file anyway (it seems to happen more often in Prime, though, which seems to have no such meachanism, no autosave, ..).

This mechanism with tmp files, combined with Mathcads autosave feature, combined with self made backups in regular intervals along with backups of my data drive lets me feel quite save anyway.

So, back to your question as how to recover a file from one of those tmp files, the answer is: "That depends".

Normally those tmp-files are supposed regular Mathcad files quite before they are rename to a regular Mathcad extension. If one of these files remains on your harddisk it means that something went wrong while saving and so it wasn't renamed and probably wasn't deleted by Mathcad because the program crashed (or the computervcrashed or had shut down). The state of such a tmp file could be anything from a file containing zero bytes up to a working and valid Mathcad file. Chances are, that,  if the file has some content, at least the first part of it is a valid Mathcad document and the last part is in some way broken - as you had experienced - or that the file contains of a completely valid Mathcad document which is just missing the last parts.

To the best of my knowledge those tmp files are not used by Mathcad to restore a broken document. This is rather the job of the file(s) in the autosave directory (if autosave is turned on).

BTW, you may find MCFxxxx.tmp files also in this autosave directory if autosave is turned on an an error occurs while Mathcad is autosaving a file.

[-MFra-]

I partly disagree. During the time-consuming saving of a worksheet, you can open windows "explorer" and examine the directory where the above worksheet is stored. You will see the worksheet and its size followed by the zero-size MFCXXXX file. This will be its size until the end of the saving. At the end of saving and in the absence of errors, the MFCXXX file is automatically deleted. I do not think there is an exchange between the two files. The exchange takes place only in the event of an excessive disturbance due to error during the saving. "Autosaving" is annoying when working with files larger than 10MB.

[terryhendicott]

Hi,

In file explorer on windows, you can alter the option on view tab to show file extensions then you can edit them in file explorer.

Terry