Lifeograph

lost data

Asked by Metcomm

I have had several similar problems in the past with Lifeograph but have always been able to recover. This though it's serious and I fear my entire diary of the past Quarter is lost!

I was working on the agenda this morning and had to leave my terminal on other business. When I returned the app had logged-off & I couldn't open the diary anymore (nor the backup!) - checked in file manager & both sizes reading 0 bytes ...... It turns out that my SSD became full with no prior warning. Is there no protection in Lifeograph against this?

On reflection it seems irresponsible to have the backup in the same working directory. I use Linux on 2 partitions, Root and Data. The working directory is default ie. "/usr/share/lifeograph/diaries/"; Is it not possible to have the backup saved at least on the other partition (in my case /home/data/ .. etc)? Ideally it should be saved off-site like Joplin or Memorize.

I've been using Lifeograph for many years now and have managed to survive many different crash scenarios but this one is serious and all my important data seems to have gone forever :(

OS : Fedora Linux 5.8.12-200.fc32x86_64 GNU/Linux

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Lifeograph Edit question
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Ahmet Öztürk
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Ahmet Öztürk (dmxe) said : 		#1

I know how it feels to lose data and feel really sorry about your loss.

As far as I understand the cause of this loss is a system failure rather than a bu gin Lifeograph itself.

As to your suggestion of enabling backups in different parititons, I can gladly implement that for the next major release i.e. 2.0. However, I strongly recommend creating backups regularly for all important files including Lifeograph diaries.

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Metcomm (stan-sykes) said : 		#2

7th Sept, 2020:

Thanks for the reply, I couldn't see how otherwise to answer you so I hope you see this.

Regarding my issue, another concern is that Lifeograph didn't flag any warning of insufficient disk space - I think you should consider that also. I do regular back-ups of my data and have now synced my Lifeograph to a Cloud service just in case.

Also something weird today, my Lifeograph program is showing the "Disable Auto-Logout" drop-down switch "greyed-out" ... is there a reason for that (My disk is clean now with plenty of space available)?

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Ahmet Öztürk (dmxe) said : 		#3

Disable auto-logout is grayed out if the current diary is not encrypted.

By the way, did you check the diary.~previousversion~ file? Was that also gone?

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Metcomm (stan-sykes) said : 		#4

"Disable auto-logout is grayed out if the current diary is not encrypted." - thanks, I've never noticed that before. Normally my diaries are encrypted but I was using my last back-up which was not (5 months old!)

First things I did check was the "diary.~previousversion~" file but unfortunately it was also reading 0 bytes - no clue what happened. Normally I think the application would've warned me but why would it erase everything, even the back up? Very weird and worrisome ....

Can't forgive myself for not backing up on a more regular basis, I guess we become complacent when things are running smoothly.

As well as more regular back-up reminders, I have moved the whole diary to a Dropbox directory now, so I hope no more trouble like this.

Thanks for the support.

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Best Ahmet Öztürk (dmxe) said : 		#5

I have just added a daily backup feature to master that saves a copy to a user selected directory. This will be available in 2.0.0.rc3.

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Metcomm (stan-sykes) said : 		#6

Thanks Ahmet Öztürk, that solved my question.