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This is the community forum for my apps Pythonista and Editorial.
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BUG: Deadly sync problem erases data from open file
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Hi everyone,
I'd like to share my deep concern with a bug that has stroke me twice. It's such an insidious bug I was almost tempted to crash iPad through the window and never look back. That kind of bug.
Scenario: You get into a plane. Launch Editorial and write non-stop for the whole flight. Your mind is flowing and Editorial sits in front of you, unobtrusively recording your train of thought.
Plane lands. Time to send what you wrote via email. You put your phone as access point. You go back to home screen on iPad and click Settings to connect to your recently created Wi-fi network. You connect.
Now you go back to home screen and click on Editorial icon. App opens. You see your file contents, then it clears the screen waiting you to create a new file. Dropbox sync starts and finishes.
File content is forever gone. Zero Kb file. Gone. Done. KO. As file is synced it keeps the file but file contents is gone. No way to recover, no way to go back.
If you are writing offline then switch online you could lose all your work. How is that even possible? It makes me lose all hope on trendy editor that do not get the basics right. Never ever allow users to lose all their written words in this way.
Anyone else stuck by this problem?
Best,
César -
This does indeed sound like a serious problem. I'm sure @omz will fix it soon. In the meantime, perhaps you should make a habit of writing on a local file when you're offline, rather than a Dropbox file. That's not an ideal solution, but at least you won't lose your work.
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Thanks @Webmaster4o. I agree that using local files seems like a safer solution, but in the end getting used to it will provoke, for sure, that my files are not synced whenever I'm away from my iPad :)
Let's hope @omz can reproduce and fix it!
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@elsatch I understand your frustration. It's important to trust your apps, and I'm sorry Editorial let you down here.
In all cases that such a behavior has been reported to me, it was actually possible to recover the data quite easily. Editorial normally never deletes files completely on its own, it should always make a backup copy of files that it "thinks" have been deleted from Dropbox. When you open Editorial's settings, there's a "Show Deleted Files" option in the "Advanced" section. While this doesn't contain files that you deleted explicitly, you should find any files there that were deleted automatically (and apparently erroneously) during a sync operation. This would typically be when you delete a file on a different device, but it seems that this detection isn't always reliable.
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I have this problem frequently, though I've always been able so far to recover the file from the deleted files settings. But it scares me every time.
Often I'll start something in local storage if I think I'll lose wifi at some point, but this defeats some of the appeal of Editorial.
I love this software. This is one of the only problems I have with it.
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Thanks @omz for your reply.
Finally I was able to recover files using your method. I'm not sure it's the best solution but at least it worked.
I still have doubts about using Editorial or Drafts when I am traveling, but I wanted to update on this important issue.
Thanks again and keep on with your good work!