Family Historian User Group

I do a Full Backup of my FH project file after every work session. Been doing this for years.

During the backup yesterday, an odd message popped up that I do not understand the cause of. A screen-shot of the message is attached.

Anyone have any idea as to what this means, and, what I could have possibly done to cause such a message to be displayed?

Update: It appears that this is tied to the obnoxious "thumbs.db" files created by Windows. Not sure as to why it is suddenly causing FH to generate a warning message during a backup operation. I just turned on the computer this afternoon and tried another Full Backup in FH and it went to normal completion with no warning messages. So, whatever was causing the problem earlier, seems to have cured itself when I rebooted the computer.

Windows was possibly updating the thumbs database at the exact same moment

The FH thumbs database is not the same thumbs database that Windows keeps. In my FH folders my thumbs database is at D:\_Data\Family Historian Projects\MyName\MyName.fh_data\Cache\ThumbCache.dat, I don't have any Thumbs.db file anywhere in the FH Project folders.

Do you have that ThumbCache.dat file in the Cache folder?

Yes, I have that file in the Cache folder.

OK, that's the FH thumbnail cache, each FH project will have it's own file. Depending on how many media items you have, that file can become quite large, and if you've deleted or renamed media files FH doesn't seem to tidy the file. You can (and I and some others do) periodically just deleted that file (with FH closed). The next time you open that project in FH it will rebuild the file based on the media items currently in the media folder, so it effectively gets tidied. Depending on how many media items you have, FH might run a bit slow while it is rebuidling the file, but once completed speed will return to normal.

Getting back to your other, problematic, ...\Media\Thumbs.db file I found this explanation on a Microsoft website:

"The thumbs.db file is used to store the thumbnails of images and videos. Anytime thumbnails view is enabled or has been enabled in Microsoft Windows the hidden file thumbs.db is automatically created in the same directory as where the thumbnails have been viewed. This file contains the information required by Windows to display the thumbnails for each of the icons and will be placed in every folder thumbnails are viewed.

This file can be safely deleted from any directory, however, it will be automatically recreated if thumbnails view is still enabled and you view that directory again. You can hide it by hiding system files but you cannot get rid of it permanently."

From that penultimate sentence I infer two things: 1 - you can just delete that file and Windows will recreate it when necessary; and 2 - it will only get created if you view open a folder (with File Explorer) in thumbnail view, so you can avoid it by only viewing a folder in List or Detail mode. It's a bit of a faff, and I see that people have complained to Microsoft, but I doubt that'll have much effect!

Hope this helps.

Bob, be sure you understand the difference between the FH ...\Cache\ThumbCache.dat file, and the Windows Thumbs.db files.
I suspect you had Windows File Explorer open on your FH Media folder with thumbnails being displayed when the Backup error message arose.

You can inhibit the Windows Thumbs.db files via Windows File Explorer.
With the Media folder displayed, choose the View tab.
Click Options to the right and choose Change folder and search options.
Choose its View tab, tick Always show icons, never thumbnails and click OK.