Swap File Handling: Preservation, Links, and Recovery

option. Writing can be switched back on by setting the 'updatecount' option to non-zero. Swap files will be created for all buffers when doing this. But when setting 'updatecount' to zero, the existing swap files will not be removed, it will only affect files that will be opened after this. If you want to make sure that your changes are in the swap file use this command: *:pre* *:preserve* *E313* *E314* :pre[serve] Write all text for the current buffer into its swap file. The original file is no longer needed for recovery. A Vim swap file can be recognized by the first six characters: "b0VIM ". After that comes the version number, e.g., "3.0". Links and symbolic links ~ On Unix it is possible to have two names for the same file. This can be done with hard links and with symbolic links (symlinks). For hard links Vim does not know the other name of the file. Therefore, the name of the swapfile will be based on the name you used to edit the file. There is no check for editing the same file by the other name too, because Vim cannot find the other swapfile (except for searching all of your harddisk, which would be very slow). For symbolic links Vim resolves the links to find the name of the actual file. The swap file name is based on that name. Thus it doesn't matter by what name you edit the file, the swap file name will normally be the same. However, there are exceptions: - When the directory of the actual file is not writable the swapfile is put elsewhere. - When the symbolic links somehow create a loop you get an *E773* error message and the unmodified file name will be used. You won't be able to save your file normally. ============================================================================== 2. Recovery *recovery* *E308* *E311* Basic file recovery is explained in the user manual: |usr_11.txt|. Another way to do recovery is to start Vim and use the ":recover" command. This is easy when you start Vim to edit a file and you get the "ATTENTION: Found a swap file ..." message. In this case the single command ":recover" will do the work. You can also give the name of the file or the swap file to the recover command: *:rec* *:recover* *E305* *E306* *E307* :rec[over] [file] Try to recover [file] from the swap file. If [file] is not given use the file name for the current buffer. The current contents of the buffer are lost. This command fails if the buffer was modified. :rec[over]! [file] Like ":recover", but any changes in the current buffer are lost. *E312* *E309* *E310* *E1364* Vim has some intelligence about what to do if the swap file is corrupt in some way. If Vim has doubt about what it found, it will give an error message and insert lines with "???" in the text. If you see an error message while recovering, search in the file for "???" to see what is wrong. You may want to cut and paste to get the text you need. The most common remark is "???LINES MISSING". This means that Vim cannot read the text from the original file. This can happen if the system crashed and parts of the original file were not written to disk. Be sure that the recovery was successful before overwriting the original file or deleting the swap file. It is good practice to write the recovered file elsewhere and run 'diff' to find out if the changes you want are in the recovered file. Or use |:DiffOrig|. Once you are sure the recovery is ok delete the swap file. Otherwise, you will continue to get warning messages that the ".swp" file already exists. vim:tw=78:ts=8:noet:ft=help:norl:

This section explains how to manually preserve changes to the swap file using the `:preserve` command and identifies swap files by their "b0VIM " signature. It also discusses how Vim handles hard links and symbolic links in relation to swap file naming, resolving symbolic links to the actual file for swap file creation. Additionally, the section details the recovery process, explaining how to use the `:recover` command to retrieve data from swap files, handle corrupted swap files (marked by "???"), and verify successful recovery before overwriting the original file or deleting the swap file.