InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Paul_J_Miller on 2018/11/08 16:47

Having saved a large document I was working on as a HTML document believing it to be a copy of the document in InfoQube I deleted it after doing some tests to see how it printed.

Going back to the document in InfoQube there is noting in the document pane except for the statement that the HTML file which I saved cannot be found.

So instead of saving a 'copy' of the document I was infact transferring the document to the local hard disk!

Looking in the recycle bin on Windows the file was not there. I thought all deleted files were relocated to the recycle bin before being properly deleted, apparently not.

I have just lost a lot of work.

Comments

Paul,

when you say you saved it -- do you mean it was actually saved to disk?

1) dont use your machine to save any new files.

2) If you dont have it already, download Recuva** or some equivalent programme. You can possibly get a portable version of it. (If all your files are on the C drive -- you dont want to install anything, it may overwrite the deleted file. In that case 'install' the portable on a USB stick and use it from there).

Do a quick scan of the place/drive you saved the file -- if it is not found do a deep scan -- it will possibly take a long time and find a lot of irrelevant files.

I presume this the portable version: www.ccleaner.com/recuva/download/portable

And here the homepage: www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Hi Paul,

I just experience the very same thing, except the content was a test. So, I'm very sorry about this. I'm fixing it immediately.

Now, to recover your content:

Open an IQ backup (Doc pane does auto-save)
Use an undelete program
Use version history for the IQ file (Dropbox ?)

Hope you can recover it...

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

In v110, Save As now works as follows:

If content stored in the IQBase (default), saves a copy of the HTML in the specified file. Item is unchanged
If showing a web page, saves a copy of the HTML in the specified file. Item is unchanged
Else (showing a local file), current file is copied to the specified file and the item file reference is updated

It was a bit of a mess before, so hopefully, that settles that issue for the future

HTH !

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

This was my own fault for assuming I was working with a copy and not the original transferred to the disk. In most programs this is how it works.

Also I should have been testing this out on a test page not live data. I have a test page for the CSS files but it did not have any graphics.

Recuva listed thousands of files but not that one. I am now doing a deep scan but I am not hopeful.

Having been deleted from the disk it should have been placed in the recycle bin but it was not, I don't understand what is going on there.

In v110, IQ now works like most programs.

I really hope you can restore your file.

How was it deleted ?

I'm not an expert, but from experience the worse situation is when the file is overwritten, as it doesn't go the recycle bin. In those cases, Windows file history (anyone has this turned on ?), Dropbox versioning etc comes in handy.

Also, you could not find the content in a backup IQBase ? File > Open > File Types: Backups...

Lastly, a year ago, when trying to fix a non-working Windows update on my daughter's PC , I was asked to enter an external drive. I plugged in a USB drive and the computer erased everything to create some restore setup. That USB drive contained lots of backup information and it was lost.

After trying numerous tools, some extremely slow, I found this one: DMDE Express Edition. It was able to restore all files in a few minutes ! A $20 well spent !!

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

The backup was just the same as the main file i.e. a hanging link.

My laptop contains two disks, drives C: and D:, drive D: is a SSD and although it is in the laptop physically I have found that for some reason Windows regards it as a removable disk. When something is deleted from a removable drive it is permanently deleted.

The Recuva deep scan didn't even show the file.

But all is not lost, a backup exists which cannot be erased, it is in my mind, I wrote this document once and I can do it again. Usually when one does any project for a second time the second version is better than the first.

Also this document was an updated version of one of my earlier articles which I still have.

The earlier article was 'Reflections on the Abstraction of Information' which examines where technology is leading us and tries to put this in the context of where technology came from in a very broad context.

Now I have just read 'On the Origin of Species' by Charles Darwin and this simple idea that any system which exhibits variation, selection and heredity must also exhibit evolution is profound. This applies to all systems not just biological systems.

This idea puts the original article in a whole new light.

It will not take me long to get back to where I was.

Don't worry about it.

Hi Paul,

I'm glad to hear that you have a backup... (typical British humor :-) )

'Reflections on the Abstraction of Information'... premonitory it seems. I hope that the change in v110 will make it so your information in IQ is less abstract and more real, as in really there !

As to the actual file, the few times that I though the file wasn't there or recoverable was when I actually saved it somewhere else... Try looking in the IQ folder or sub-folder

Also, to confirm the path, you can search through you browser history: (search for file:///)

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

As the article has not actually been lost InfoQube retains it's title as one of only two note taking programs which has not managed to loose any data.

I suspect the SQL database engine is quite reliable so that even if the program crashes the data is reliably saved. At least that is my experience so far.

[quote=Paul_J_Miller]

I suspect the SQL database engine is quite reliable so that even if the program crashes the data is reliably saved. At least that is my experience so far.

[/quote]

IQ uses MS Jet 4.0 (same one used by MS Access)

In the past it has been criticized as being unreliable. However, this is due to being improperly used, by people who are not database designers (too many / wrong types of indexes, too many columns, not splitting UI and data etc.)

Access is part of the customer oriented Office suite, so that was to be expected.

In fact, it is an excellent engine, supporting zillions of records with fast read / writes.

- My 10+ year old IQBase is only 30Mb, has nearly 100,000 objects (items, field values) and is lightning fast (loading most grids is < 400mSec)

- Another long-term user's IQBase has over 3,000,000 objects without any issues.

It is built in Windows and one of the few desktop engines supporting Unicode, referential integrity, multiple concurrent users and replication

Other IM software tend to use SQLite. It is not a bad database engine, but IMO, Jet is superior.

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

v110 is now online

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

Something really wierd but really good has happened.

I looked at the item which contained the article 'Reflections on the Abstraction of Information' and it still had the hanging link so rather than delete the article and start again I deleted the contents of the 'ItemHTMLFile' field, hoping to get a fresh blank document pane to put the article in. When I went back to the document pane the article was back just as it was originally!!

It seems that when you 'Save as ...' and copy it to disk the original article is still there but the document pane now shows the file on disk instead. If you delete the file reference it goes back to the original article in the document pane. Or at least this was how it worked until you changed it in the most recent version.

This could lead to some really wierd problems if you 'Save as ...' and then edit the file on disk with an external editor but at some later stage the 'ItemHTMLFile' field gets cleared and the document goes back to the earlier version.

Anyway I am happy now I have my document back.

I have just backed up the notebase to two different places. Phew ....

Ah yes, this morning I had that thought too, but didn't get to test it and forgot about it.

So yes, the content stayed in the database and removing the file reference just showed it again. Excellent

This should not happen again of course, as this "bug" is now fixed

I love Dropbox and it's automatic versioning has saved me numerous times (not just for IQ, but other apps too). Consider saving your backups to it or enable Dropbox sync

(even if you can't use it while at work, it will help when on your laptop)

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer

I don't like storing my data on someone else's server. That's basically what 'TheCloud' is, someone elses server, and when you store your data there they can look at your data and do whatever was permitted in the small print of the 'Terms and Conditions' you signed up to without reading. And what if the company running the server goes bust or is taken over, would they just delete your data or sell it on to the highest bidder. I don't know.

I have a NAS connected to the LAN which sits between the desktop and laptop computers. It appears as drives which are mapped in to the local file system of each computer. When I get my act together I will set up a synchronisation of InfoQube files between the computers so I don't have to copy files every time. InfoQube will not be used on both computers at the same time as I can only sit in one chair at a time.

The only problem I can forsee is that the PDF files linked in to the notebase on the laptop don't work on the desktop machine because the files are in a different place on the desktop machine. It would be nice to have a folder with a set of links (Windows .LNK files) which are not synchronsed and which can point to different location on the desktop and laptop.

Actually I have just found a solution to the problem of the PDF's not being in the same place on two computers.

If you click on Save in the document pane displaying the PDF file then a dialog box comes up giving you the option to save the PDF file to the same directory as the link. The link file is still there but it now points to the PDF in the same directory.

Now if you synchronise between two computers there is no problem with the PDFs displaying on the second computer because they are in the files directory which is snchronised. The only downside is that the notebase is bigger but this is not a problem because both computers have quite capacious hard disks.

I suspect that Pierre planned it this way to solve this very problem, however if it is in the documentation I haven't found it yet.

Hì Paul,

If using multiple computers, IQ will search for various locations to "intelligently" find the file, even if the IQBase / IQBase.Files folder is in a different location / drive.

That works for files, but of course cannot work when using Windows link to files (.lnk files) so that is a good reason NOT to use links but instead store the location of the actual file in IQ

Pierre_Admin

IQ Designer