Why Does 'Save for Previous' in LabVIEW Fail for VIs on a Network Drive?

Updated Feb 11, 2019

Reported In

Software

  • LabVIEW

Issue Details

When saving VIs stored in a folder hierarchy on a network drive to a previous version, the save fails. The save may fail without displaying any errors, or the save may report a Generic File I/O error like the following:

LabVIEW: Generic file I/O error.
Save for previous failed for some unspecified reason. Memory could be full or the disk access may not be allowed.


In the case that the save fails silently, most of the folder hierarchy may be created, but some of the VIs will be missing.

 

Solution

This issue is related to the way LabVIEW handles errors when reading from a network drive.  This can be avoided by ensuring that all file operations during the save take place only on local hard drives. The procedure below will resolve the issue.
  1. Copy the entire folder hierarchy to a local hard drive.
  2. Open the local copy of the top-level VI to be saved.
  3. When saving to the previous version ensure that the VIs will also be saved on a local hard disk.
  4. Copy the newly created folder hierarchy to the desired network location.
Saving for a previous version of LabVIEW is a lot more complicated internally than saving a file to a different location, so duplicating the files may work even if saving for a previous version does not.

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