Smart Notebook 11.4 Corrupt??? Slides

[CommodoreS]

A teacher was working on Smart Notebook at home (on a school staff class laptop). Several (but not all) slides on the file are showing as Corrupt??? when opening the file (screenshot below). The laptop has no Hard Drive Issues and is Virus Free.

 

Does anyone know what could have caused this? I am guessing it is impossible to recover the Corrupt??? slides inside the file.

 

Only thing of note was there was a large amount of slides (around 200) inside the file.

 

[supawat1]

I did not have the same issue as you, but it was solved by using Smart Notebook Express. Try to open your file using this website http://express.smarttech.com . It might help.

[FishCustard]

Can you save the file in a different format (e.g. .iwb)? If so, try opening it and see what you get.

[Leeannec]

I would love to hear how you solved this. Just this week (09 March 2015) (my Notebook started acting up, saying it can't open the file. It's from a newer version of Notebook software, try saving it as a version 9 document." This is not an option. These files were created over the past 5 years, using various versions of Notebook, and I have NEVER had an issue opening them until this past week. SMART advised our IT that the situation is "the document corruption instead of a version issue. The company suggests that when you open a document which is on a USB disk or external disk, copy the doc to your local hard drive first then open it on the local hard drive not the usb or external disk."

 

I have version 11.3 on my home pc and school laptop.

 

Some of my Notebook files now contain NO information, some contain SOME of the images, and now I am EXTREMELY hesitant to open any of my files. This is hundreds of hours of work on these files.

 

One file is 71.2 MB that is now missing several images

 

I did find this info while searching on the internet: SMART File Error? | Teacher's Corner [h=3]If you are receiving an error when you try to open a SMART notebook file that states that you need to open the file in a previous version of SMART notebook, it happens because you are pulling a large file from the network and it becomes corrupted. The only way to fix it, you need to send the corrupt file to SMART Technologies.[/h][h=3]Here is the link to the form:[/h][h=3]SMART Notebook software - SMART Technologies[/h][h=3][/h][h=3]This method will only allow you to send a file that is up to 10mb in size. SMART suggests if you are working with a large file always pull it from your local C drive and back it up, opening it from the network drive will not always work.[/h]Seems incredible that SMART has not corrected / communicated this problem to its users.

 

I would also love to hear how people are backing up their NOTEBOOK files (virtual, USB, hard drive, etc.) so as to prevent this from occurring in the future.

 

Hoping someone out there has a solution!

 

MANY thanks!

[Leeannec]

Further to the above post, this information was found at SMART: KnowledgeBase - You're unable to open a file with SMART Notebook software

[CommodoreS]

I never got any further on this as the web version did not fix the problem and not having a valid support contract with smart they are unwilling to help and assist. I think the best thing to suggest is to make a backup and keep a backup of the backup. Make a backup of your files before you open any more, so if they do corrupt you have a backup.

[Leeannec]

This was my response from SMART: "The nature of file corruption is such that if any one of the software or hardware components fails in the process of writing (or even sometimes reading) data to/from a storage medium, even momentarily, the file can lose bits of data which leads to corruption. This can be a cumulative process happening over time, or sometimes more immediate.

Due to this nature, I am unable to provide an exact reason as to why the files suddenly became corrupt, though the most likely cause is simply that the USB drive you were using is beginning to fail. This can happen as USB drives have a limited (though high) amount of writes available to the flash memory before a sector becomes unusable, and while it may appear as if the drive is behaving properly, the underlying memory of the storage device may in fact have many dead sectors that go unreported to your operating system.

Unfortunately once files have become corrupt there is little we can do to recover this lost data.

I do recommend you use a new USB drive if possible to prevent this from happening in the future. As well, maintaining a backup of your files on additional storage, such as an external hard drive, Cloud storage, etc. may be a prudent idea to ensure your future work is not lost. In any case, please ensure that when working with files, as your IT team has suggested, to save the files to your local hard drive when working on them. Once you are done with the file and have the software closed, you may then move the file safely to/from your flash drive; just be sure that you never open a file from any external storage like your flash drive as this under the right conditions can cause file corruption."

[Diello]

We frequently have this problem with files stored in a user's network home directory. SMART's answers about not storing them on network drives/USB sticks is ridiculous. It is the only software application that suffers from this bug, so they obviously need to take a long, hard, look at how they're writing/opening files and error checking. They want school's to trust their resources to SMART, but SMART by their own admission can't guarantee their software won't corrupt the file!