dsrender Posted June 25, 2014 Share Posted June 25, 2014 So this is the third time now that this has happened to me. I open up Chief and look at my libraries and my entire User Library is gone. There isn't even a tab for it to open. I haven't upgraded or anything so there shouldn't be a need to upload from an older version and all of my other Chief Libraries are there and fine but everything I've saved as my own over the course of a year is missing. Is there a reason for this and is there anywhere I can find my items instead of completely redoing everything like I've had to do before? Any help would be great! Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lbuttery Posted June 25, 2014 Share Posted June 25, 2014 You need to contact CA's tech support there is probably little advice that other users can offer this should not be happening Lew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cheryl_C_Crane Posted June 25, 2014 Share Posted June 25, 2014 is it possible that a filter was accidently turned on? Happened to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsrender Posted June 25, 2014 Author Share Posted June 25, 2014 hmmm no filters but good advice, thank you both! I will contact tech support or I suppose just start working at redoing. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonParsons Posted June 25, 2014 Share Posted June 25, 2014 Yes, I had the same thing happen to me. If I searched for a user item, it would show up, but if I selected show in browser, There was nothing. They were able to restore the missing items from the folder for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanPellant Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 I suffered the absent User Catalogs frequently when changing computers - I run X6 on three computers and deactivate then activate my license from one to another. Usually on fresh statup, just after going through the activation dialog, my User Catalogs or even all the Catalogs would not list anything in the Library Browser.... it was a symptom of a deeper problem in X6... I have lots of custom library symbols; many were created from 1999 onwards... some really old ones from CA 6 or 7 that had totally different ways of defining materials. Many materials were "pointing to" textures (bitmaps / jpegs) that are longer on my system. This was sort of accepted by Chief as being a lack with no great problems through to X5. X6 has problems. When importing a "legacy" library catalog it will advise that a texture cannot be found and provide the options to find or replace it or cancel to ignore. Cancel causes problems later. X6 will fail to export a catalog that contains items that do not have a matching texture. The whole catalog will fail to export if it contains missing texture paths. This was not a game stopper with X5. X6 stops dead... and this is a clue to the blank / missing catalog lists in the Library Browser. It seems that on first load, X6 builds a thumbnail cache of texture images. If it cannot find a texture, it goes slow, or fails to show the catalog. This has caused slow X6 loads and missing catalogs on my computers. Only fix has been to check every legacy symbol I have for material assignments; fix where bad or missing; export the catalog; delete the loaded one, import the recent export. Very tedious and time consuming.... results: I can now reliably export my user catalogs in X6 and import them on other computers; and X6 startup is much faster. To stretch my sense of humor: "jasper" is a Colorbond color that is a brown. When my Catalog textures got confused, a "jasper stone" color was linked instead... "jasper stone" is green. That was almost funny at the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KirkClemons Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 We've tied this to dragging and dropping items from one folder to another in the Select Library Object dialog instead of the Library Browser as well as dragging and dropping items with special characters in the name such as '@', '#', etc. They have since fixed the behavior for the special characters in update 16.2 and the dragging and dropping behavior has been restricted to the Library Browser so that you can no longer drag items while in the Select Library Object dialog. This was added in update 16.3. There is a chance that libraries that have been migrated forward are still exhibiting this behavior but over time we hope this issue will go away as the libraries are migrated and updated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cheryl_C_Crane Posted June 26, 2014 Share Posted June 26, 2014 Ian, Thanks for this post. It explains ALOT. My system is running X6 so slowly that it is reminiscent of X3's library. Like yourself I have a lot of legacy symbols from old versions of CA and many from Jay Palmer and other developers. I ALWAYS start out with the Error message that a material can't be found, and I ALWAYS click Don't show me this again, and Cancel. After reading and rereading your explanation, I guess that I will just always have a slow system. The amount of time that it would take to check thousands of symbols would be measured in weeks or months. Dang! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KirkClemons Posted June 27, 2014 Share Posted June 27, 2014 I suffered the absent User Catalogs frequently when changing computers - I run X6 on three computers and deactivate then activate my license from one to another. Usually on fresh statup, just after going through the activation dialog, my User Catalogs or even all the Catalogs would not list anything in the Library Browser.... it was a symptom of a deeper problem in X6... I have lots of custom library symbols; many were created from 1999 onwards... some really old ones from CA 6 or 7 that had totally different ways of defining materials. Many materials were "pointing to" textures (bitmaps / jpegs) that are longer on my system. This was sort of accepted by Chief as being a lack with no great problems through to X5. X6 has problems. When importing a "legacy" library catalog it will advise that a texture cannot be found and provide the options to find or replace it or cancel to ignore. Cancel causes problems later. X6 will fail to export a catalog that contains items that do not have a matching texture. The whole catalog will fail to export if it contains missing texture paths. This was not a game stopper with X5. X6 stops dead... and this is a clue to the blank / missing catalog lists in the Library Browser. It seems that on first load, X6 builds a thumbnail cache of texture images. If it cannot find a texture, it goes slow, or fails to show the catalog. This has caused slow X6 loads and missing catalogs on my computers. Only fix has been to check every legacy symbol I have for material assignments; fix where bad or missing; export the catalog; delete the loaded one, import the recent export. Very tedious and time consuming.... results: I can now reliably export my user catalogs in X6 and import them on other computers; and X6 startup is much faster. To stretch my sense of humor: "jasper" is a Colorbond color that is a brown. When my Catalog textures got confused, a "jasper stone" color was linked instead... "jasper stone" is green. That was almost funny at the time. This is different than the problem the OP was having. His items are completely gone which indicates a corrupt library file. Missing textures are generally a result of files being moved, renamed etc. Backing up your User Catalog periodically to a .calibz file can give you a way of restoring materials that are missing their textures as the calibz file contains copies of the textures when it is exported. Reimporting the calibz file extracts the textures to the User Data directory under the Textures folder in the form of a ZIP file. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BryceEngstrom Posted August 18, 2014 Share Posted August 18, 2014 I have had this problem off and on for months. Usually, I could just restart Chief and/or my computer and the User Library would re-appear. No such luck this morning. Priority support suggested I try and import my X5 library, which worked, but that has meant losing a year or more of additions and modification, especially recent code changes to a lot of my details and notes. The User Library file itself was around 1.7 GB but showing as empty in Chief. Online support has said that my have just screwed up the file more by adding lots of copies of things. I assume my library file is corrupted and sent it in. Hope they can fix it. I never have done any dragging and dropping with the Library. I have always just cut/pasted within the Library itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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