Strange set of settings changed after system crash
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I had a couple unrelated (to Vivaldi) system crashes, and for the first time Vivaldi flipped some of its settings in the process (it was open at the time). I can't figure out though why it chose these (they're spread out all over Settings), or why it happened at all, really, since this is hardly the first time the system has crashed:
Download location
Smooth scrolling
Notify about updates
Save Browsing History (duration)
Lazy Load Restored Tabs
HomepageThere are probably a couple more, but those are the ones that I noticed. MANY more (most) settings were not changed, which is what's puzzling (though good).
Also changed were a couple settings that the underlying Chromium keeps, like Site Settings (the list of sites that were set for "clear on exit" for cookies) and tab notification permissions (which sites are allowed to show notifications).
1.13.1008.40
Thanks
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An "open" application uses data/files located in RAM to perform its operations in a timely way, but it also accesses files on the drive, opening and moving them back and forth between RAM and drive as needed to preserve changes made by the program. Often, when a system crashes, there is sudden loss of coordination of what is going on... data can be lost totally or partially from RAM, drive files that were open and in process of being edited may be abruptly closed and possibly corrupted, data being copied from one file to another may be perturbed, etc. In some cases, a drive file may be totally corrupted and rendered unusable; in other cases, data bytes may be incompletely altered, but not totally destroyed; in still other cases, a file needed to index other files can be corrupted and everything indexed by it made inaccessible or be incorrectly indexed; and so on.
What happens during and after a crash is ultimately unpredictable, though designers of hardware and software attempt to make consequences of such failures appear as gracefully as possible. A great deal depends on just what was occurring at the instant when the crash occurred, and the nature of the crash itself, in terms of what the crash details permitted the software to preserve/recover as things collapsed around it.
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Yes, that it's unpredictable makes sense. It's fortunate that it's not generally a problem in such crashes.
In this case, the database in "Local App Settings" must have been caught out at just the wrong time, somehow affecting some settings that not only weren't in the process of being changed but hadn't been changed in ages.
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