Moving render jobs from one UF5 install to another

[Humbug]

Does anyone know how to move render jobs from one UF5 installation to another? I have not been able to find where it stores its current render queue or the partially-completed jobs, after looking in the obvious places (program files, documents and settings). I need to rescue some half-completed render jobs after a disk crash that took out the operating system but probably left UF5's user files alone (but required reinstalling UF5 itself -- program files bought it, documents and settings did not, different disk as I'd wisely moved d&s to a fat external RAID a year or so ago).

Any information about how UF5 stores the job queue and the incomplete individual jobs would be useful.

[David Makin]

I just tried to find out (UF5.02 on Vista) and couldn't find anything either.
I suspect you'll have to ask Frederik directly (I don't know if it's even possible if you didn't make a urj backup file).

[Humbug]

I've solved half the problem. UF stores the partially-complete images as .udr files with hexadecimal-code names in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Ultra Fractal 5.

Restoring these didn't suffice to make them appear in UF's job queue though. Nor does "restore job" recognize the .udr files' format.

Now I just need to know where the job queue is stored. Probably it's in the damn registry, which means "how do I use regedit, or some other tool, to browse a registry hive other than the system's native one?"

(I found the udr files by looking for every file with a recent modification date. I don't know why I hadn't previously found them searching for "ultra fractal 5".)

[Humbug]

Can't find the job queue in the old registry hive either. I looked in the software hive under every key named Ultra Fractal 5.

This is damned odd. It has to be stored somewhere, since the queue is remembered across sessions and across reboots.

[cKleinhuis]

i do not think it is in the registry, try looking for some .ini file in the program folder, oder in the program settings folder

.... just a guess ...


 

[Humbug]

Program folder has only uf5.exe, the help file, a readme file, and the uninstaller. The readme and help say very little about render jobs and none about formats and storage.

It creates directories in My Documents and Application Data. Both have been migrated, and the jobs didn't appear in the queue, so the job queue data cannot be in either.

Searches for files modified in the past 2 months turned up the udr files, some completed renders, some ufr files, and files I can identify as belonging to other applications or to Windows (such as hotfix uninstallers).

Some of the ufr files were rendered after they were last modified, so any render queue management file should have been at least as recently modified as them, and therefore should have appeared as well.

That only appears to leave the registry.

Now if only there was a way to search for registry keys by modification time.

[Humbug]

I did it.

It was in the registry, but not in the hives in windows/system32/config, but in the user's NTUSER.DAT hive. There's a key full of render job info.

The really tricky bit: I needed to create a new user with the same name as the user name I had before the crash, log in as that user to create its documents folder, and copy the Ultra Fractal subirectory of My Documents to that user's documents. The udr files apparently contain, in some non-ASCII form (probably the files are compressed), the paths of the files associated with the render (though the udr file's own name is encoded in the registry keys in a fairly transparent manner).

It's now resumed the jobs. I hope they actually complete successfully. If it corrupts them, I'll have more work to do (starting with copying over the udr files again to undo whatever corruption happens, then figuring out what went wrong -- the formulae and other stuff are all copied all over the place though, and I was able to open a file from the file menu mru after the registry patch and zoom into it, so it should work).

Next job: figuring out where snes9x is now saving save-state files!

[David Makin]

I've solved half the problem. UF stores the partially-complete images as .udr files with hexadecimal-code names in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Ultra Fractal 5.

That's very strange - I knew UF saved the in-progress files as ".udr" but even though I quit UF part-way through a disk render when I did a search for "*.udr" on drive C it found nothing (on Vista).
Maybe I missed something in the search options - I'm not used to Vista yet, I normally use XP.

I just tried the same thing on XP and a search for "udr" found the files without a problem.

[Humbug]

Vista's search seems to avoid some directories.

Set folder options to show hidden/system/etc. folders and search again. If that doesn't work, include non-indexed files. Or just browse manually to Users/<name>/AppData/Ultra Fractal 5 (I think).

Anyway, hope my posts here help others who need to recover jobs after a hardware failure.

[David Makin]

...
Anyway, hope my posts here help others who need to recover jobs after a hardware failure.

They probably will...though of course a simpler solution is every so often back-up the render job to a urj

[Humbug]

One of the jobs completed and it looks good.