Why Yed keeps renaming my file on save

Question

I am using Yed to edit a graphml which I created. Sometimes (quite often), when I make edits and try saving, it doesn't clear the "modified" star in the document title, but in fact renames the original file into something else (adds some random symbols to the name). When I try saving again, it opens a "save as" dialog allowing me to actually save under the old name.

I suspect that this might have something to do with the file being in a dropbox folder, but it definitely does not happen with any other software I've used to edit anything in there (like MS Word). And it is really, really, irritating to have to constantly keep track of this weird behavior, double-save and manually delete extra trash. Not to mention that it makes Dropbox sync all these extra renames, deletions and replacements instead of simply updating the file.

Is there any way to disable this crazy "feature" and just, you know, SAVE? Or at least don't silently rename anything if save fails for any reason, but just let me know about it...

Answer 1

When saving a modified diagram, yEd creates a temporary file and writes the modified diagram to that temporary file. Once writing the temporary is finished successfully, yEd replaces the existing diagram file with the temporary file. This ensures that an error while saving a diagram does not destroy existing files.

Seems like your dropbox folder cannot handle this workflow (maybe the automatic synchronization of your dropbox folder takes a very long time compared to regular I/O operations or maybe the synchronization prevents or reverts the renaming of the temporary file).

yEd does not offer a setting to prevent using a temporary file when saving a modified diagram.

There are only two workarounds I can think of:

• Do not use "Save" but always use "Save As".
• Do not save to a dropbox folder, but only to regular local folders.