[Qgis-developer] Warning - shapefile corruption on 2.16/master and how to recover

[Nyall Dawson]

Unfortunately a fairly nasty regression has slipped in to 2.16 and is
still present on master. This results in shapefile corruption in
certain circumstances.

While I've hit this issue maybe 3 or 4 times in the last 2 months, I
haven't been able to track down exactly what causes this. It seems
related to using the split or reshape tool on a shapefile, then saving
the changes and getting the errors "Cannot reopen datasource
xxx.shp|layerid=0 in read-only mode" and "Data source is invalid
(Unable to open xxx.shx or xxx.SHX.Try --config SHAPE_RESTORE_SHX true
to restore or create it)" in the log.

A full report is at http://hub.qgis.org/issues/15570

Hopefully we can resolve this before the next round of releases. In
the meantime, there's a workaround for recovering data:

In the same folder as the shapefile there'll be additional files
"xxx_packed.shp" and "xxx_packed.shx". Renaming the "xxx_packed.shx"
file to "xxx.shx" allows the original shapefile to be reopened.

Nyall