Randomly deleted files

ssuni

Hi,
Has anyone else experienced notes getting randomly deleted? Twice now I've searched for some urgent information in very important documents in The Archive, only to find that those documents had at some point been deleted. Checking my Trash has been fruitless as I permanently deleted all items for it sometime after each incident.

Will

I've experienced this too. I've thought it was my "sometimers" acting up. (Periodic Alzheimers)
I have been quickly able to restore missing files via Dropbox so I not bothered to report this issue. I not sure how we'd test or replicate this problem. I use two laptops in a place that has an iffy internet connection, problems sometimes syncing via Dropbox, and that might be my particular problem.

GeoEng51

I have not encountered this problem at all. I store my ZK on Dropbox. I only have The Archive open on one computer (almost constantly) and I have a good internet connection.

ssuni

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's experienced this. I will start syncing my notes to Dropbox to mitigate the issue—thank you both for the idea—, and if I figure out how to replicate it I'll post here. This software is too good for me to give it up

Sascha

@ssuni Christian is on vacation. It might take a couple of days until reviews this thread. (And I am not help for that)

ssuni

@Sascha noted (heh), thank you!

I have an update: I'd forgotten that my Documents folder (which contains my archive directory) is synced to iCloud Storage. Once I remembered, I found out that iCloud Storage temporarily saves all deleted files, so I looked for my missing notes but still could not find them. Maybe they were never saved at all?

ctietze

Hey @ssuni -- sorry to hear you've lost data! If I recall correctly, all data loss reports of this kind I am aware of were due to external synchronization service hiccups we cannot do much about. Dropbox overall seems to play well pretty with The Archive. That being said, in the past, @Will reported Dropbox sync trouble that produced file duplication. I will be able to fix this in an upcoming update from our side, and maybe that'll help with other services "losing" files, too.

This is a tough problem in from a technical perspective. It's super hard to tell when a file goes missing "over the wire". Is it an expected remote deletion, or is it a sync error? The result on your disk looks the same: the file is gone. -- The Archive could try to remedy this by bringing these events to your attention: it could ask the user to verify if a deletion was expected or not. I personally suspect this will get on people's nerves quickly and they click a "Don't show this again" box pretty soon, effectively disabling that safety net. So to make any safety net more effective, there needs to be a less annoying, automatic, and more reliable way. There could be ways to provide longer-term file restoration. Restoring lost data sounds like the best thing we can aim for at the moment, because preventing this from happening is out of our control. I'll discuss options with Sascha.

rdp123

Hi everyone, I had this same issue during a backup after returning a work computer. It was driving me nuts because I was losing both old files after using this program as an external brain for 5+ years, both for personal and work things. I had numerous back up and went to search for a file by slug and when I found it in my iCloud drive, I saw it was within the Archive, but had been moved to "New Folder With Items." I am dead sure I did not create this folder, but it contained nearly 600 files. When I added it to my working directory, the broken links resolved and I appeared to find the missing files.

TLDR, check to see if your archive has created a folder for some reason. Hope this helps the developers understand what may be causing the hiccup. It was a pain, but glad to retain my confidence that my files are still there.

ctietze

Huh, that's odd; The Archive doesn't create folders in its normal operation on notes at all. I've checked all code pathways leading to directory creation, and it's either the initial "Notes" directory on the very first launch of the app where the sample notes go, the 'media' folder (if it doesn't exist); or directories in the app settings for plug-ins and themes.

I don't trust iCloud Drive, though. It can offload files to iCloud if your Mac runs out of disk space without notice and trip up when an app tries to load hundreds or thousands of not-locally-existing files at once.

"New Folder with Items" is what you get from Finder with ⌃⌘N usually, though, so maybe a shortcut was applied to the wrong Finder window once by accident.