Possible corruption when saving an array to disk?

[JoKa]

I store game data in an array. While experimenting with the code I destroyed my array accidentally because I saved it to disk and a few event lines later I gave another save-command.

This seems logical to me, I guess it's a timing problem when using this command 2 times within one MMF loop. But now I'm a little scared there may be other timing problems which could corrupt a file.

How can I make sure a file is written completely before giving another write command? For example, if writing is delayed because the hd was in power saving and needs to spin up. Could something like this cause trouble?

[Yves]

When you save an array, the file is closed before the command returns, so you can do several Save actions one after each other, I don't see why there would be a timing problem. There must be another reason for this problem.

Yves.

[JoKa]

I already fixed the problem some days ago, so it's a bit hard to recreate. Is it possible there's a conflict between loading and saving?

Just found a way to add at this strange behaviour again, maybe I was wrong and it's not the combination save-save but load-save instead.

Here's what I do:
- load array and read some of it's strings
- activate group "Test" when timer is greater than 00"-70 (I don't want this timer condition, but it prevents malfunction)
- in group "Test" I compare one specific string of the array with a String Object
- if the strings are different, I change some array fields and save the updated file
- the group is deactivated right after this check
- jump to next frame when timer is greater than 00"-80 and group "Test" is deactivated

This works fine! But once I activate group "Test" without a timer delay, all data of the array is lost, all fields are empty. That's why I thought there may be a timing problem when accessing the file. Can it be that loading is only partially complete when the strings are compared, then the check fails and the incomplete data is saved, corrupting the array's structure?

The timer condition seems to be the only difference between proper function and desaster