“All databases crash” doesn’t sound like something I would say, so I went back and found the email you are referring to from last November, which I am reproducing here since what I stated was quite nuanced.
Ideally, Panorama should never crash. If there are identifiable circumstances under which Panorama X crashes, we fix that problem. So no, I have no advice on how to avoid crashes, if I did, I would change Panorama to fix it. Fortunately, very few people are reporting crashes with Panorama X these days. Each month, Panorama X cumulative usage is now well over 6,000 hours, so we are well past the beta test stage. The reported crash rate is very low. It would be great if it was zero, but that has never happened for any significant software project in the last 60 years of the computer industry. I’m sorry that you are an outlier in this. By the way, you mention that you never had a crash with Panorama 6, but I can assure you that Panorama 6 definitely would crash sometimes. We didn’t have the instrumentation on Panorama 6 to tell us the exact rate of crashes, so I can’t say if it is higher or lower than Panorama X, but customers definitely experienced crashes, just like any large software program.
It sounds like perhaps you have a database that has gotten corrupted. This is unusual but can happen, possibly due to a software bug, or an intermittent hardware issue, or even a cosmic ray. Seriously, cosmic rays can flip bits on a silicon chip, I wish modern computers included error correcting memory as a standard, unfortunately on the Mac line only the Mac Pro has ECC.
I’m not sure what the “reopen” button you are referring to is. It’s not part of Panorama – I think it is an Apple button that can appear depending on how you have set your system to respond to crashes.
That fact that you were able to recover from a cloud backup lends credence to the idea that the original database became corrupted from some intermittent cause. Hopefully you’ll have better luck going forward now that you’ve recovered from a backup. If you wanted to go even further, you could export all the data to a text file, then re-import it. That will “clean out” any bad bits in the database structure itself.
Any time there is a Panorama crash that is an issue we are concerned about. Unfortunately, crashes can never be reduced to zero, there are just too many complications, hardware problems, different operating systems with different drivers, etc. We keep track of all crashes to look for patterns to try and fix any problem that regularly causes crashes. Unfortunately, crash reports contain limited useful information, it’s rare that a bug can be fixed just from a crash report.
Note: In the three months since I sent this email, Panorama X usage is up about 15%, which to me is an indication that people are using it more and more. I wouldn’t expect that if it was crashing and losing data all the time. If that was the case I would expect the usage statistics to fall precipitously. I watch those usage numbers every day. And even though usage is up, crashes have fallen about 25% since Panorama X 10.1 was released last summer.
Panorama already has my daily attention. Though you can’t see progress on a daily basis, work is proceeding on a daily basis (usually weekends also). As I stated in my email, it would be awesome if crashes and bugs were zero on everyone’s computer, using every possible hardware and operating system combination. Zero is not possible, but I’ll work to get as close to that as can be, to maximize the benefit for the largest number of users.