Several years of entries lost

ScottPrazak

I'm on android on a galaxy s22. I've been using Diarium for quite a while since 2018 or 19 but I noticed recently that all my entries prior to 2022 are gone. I have always had the app sync to Google drive, but it's still blank even when I try to manually sync. I even tried to import manually but it says the file in the sync folder is not a database. Thought I'd ask here if there's anything to try to recover them. This is very frustrating.

timo

I understand the frustration, sorry for this problem. Things like this should not happen at all with a journal!
The sync always syncs the database in its entirety (except the media files) so I don't really understand how this could happen.
Have you at some point switched devices and if so, when exactly?
From when exactly is the earliest entry? Exactly 1st Jan 2022?
There was a bug in the Google Drive sync that could have led to data loss in certain cases when changing devices / setting up a new device, but it has already been fixed last year.

ScottPrazak

My oldest entry is May 4th 2022. I did switch devices, and it appears that I did this about 1 month prior to my earliest entry. Interesting. I also have the same account synced to the app on my PC, and this does appear to have entries as far back as 6/11/18. I exported everything to all three types of file to my PC to try to save them. What's the next step? I'm afraid they'll get erased if I click the sync button. Is there any way to retrieve the lost entries? If not, is there a way to prevent this from happening in the future?

timo

ScottPrazak If you have entries on the PC but not on the other devices, then those devices were not synced (with the same Cloud account).
As @recobb said, the most important thing to do is to use the "backup diary" button on each device that creates a .diary backup file.
When there is a sync conflict, Diarium should show you a prompt asking if you want to download the remote or upload the local database. Diarium can currently only do partial merges, with a maximum of 7 days to be merged. I will look into this logic in the near future and see if this can be improved or if there are any drawbacks. I also talked about this here.
@ScottPrazak If you are ok with it, you can send me the .diary backup files and I do a manual merge for you.
Otherwise (after you have all the backup files!) you can then also try to sync and see if that helps. Or you do a .Excel export and then manually copy-paste it back in to the app.

recobb

Before you do anything, if you have a database on your PC that goes all the way back, go to settings and "Backup Diary", then make copies of that file for safety. After that you can experiment with synching. I worry about the logic about how it synchronizes if I was dumb enough to make edits on two different platforms before synching. Does it pick one or the other, or try to combine them? If something is accidentally deleted on one platform, does that mean I've lost it on all the others if I synchronize before I realize it was deleted?
Anyhow, I make backups every few days, just for my own peace of mind.

ScottPrazak

It was really that simple. Somehow the windows app needed to re-log into the google drive account. Not sure why. I guess I just hadn't used the windows app for some time despite being much easier to type on than my phone. My phone must have somehow gotten out of sync when re-installing the app on my new phone. Not sure why it overwrote the google drive account with blank data for everything prior to that date...

Anyway, the windows app gave me the choice to upload or download when syncing. I uploaded, and now everything is back. Just some quirky behavior, I guess. Very happy to have everything back.