One of our students seems to have lost her annotation file. She opened
a new file (say xxx.eaf) but ELAN started hanging on that file. Because
of these problems she opened another file (yyy.eaf) with which she had
no technical problems. Because students are supposed to hand in their
.eaf-files with filenames in the ‘xxx’-format, she tried to rename her
yyy.eaf to xxx.eaf. After doing that and on opening the (now
overwritten) xxx.eaf file, she noticed that the content was not what
she expected. The annotations made in the yyy.eaf file were lost
When automatic backup is switched on ELAN saves a backup file in the same directory as the opened eaf file: xxx.eaf is backed up in xxx.eaf.001.
A backup file can be opened in ELAN after removing the .001 part.
When the renaming is done in the explorer or finder the the backup file holds the old information, until the renamed file is opened in ELAN. Once the backup process has started the new information will replace the old information in the backup file.
When the renaming is performed by a Save As in ELAN the backup process will replace the old information in the backup file the first time the backup process is called.
There is no other place where ELAN stores backup information. So, it is likely that you have to revert to a safe copy of the file from a backup drive or something like that (if you have one).
Han