Data Recovery

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lindsay...@gmail.com

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May 1, 2016, 3:45:36 AM5/1/16
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Hi Grant, 

I had manually input all of my data into Sofa on Wednesday, and had been working on recoding everything for the past coupe of days, when today the program froze and became unresponsive. I had to shut down my computer and restart it, and when I reopened Sofa, none of my data was available anymore. My best guess is that I might have accidentally trashed something on my desktop during the last hour that could have held my data file. I've removed any suspect files from the trash, but when I search for the file name, I still can't find it anywhere. Can you maybe give me an idea of default file names/locations for data tables created on Sofa? I think it was the default name "NEW", but when I look for that in Finder, nothing comes up. 

Any ideas would be very much appreciated. 

Thank you!

Best, 

Lindsay

Grant Paton-Simpson

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May 1, 2016, 3:54:34 AM5/1/16
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Hi Lindsay,

File locations - all under /Users/username/sofastats (or similar depending on operating system e.g. OS X,Linux etc). It will have a sibling folder called sofastats_recovery.

Note - SOFA has a backup button too which you might want to use along the way to be safe if you're worried the problem could happen again.

All good?

All the best,
Grant
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Lindsay Merrill

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May 1, 2016, 4:25:34 AM5/1/16
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Hi Grant, 

Thank you for such a fast reply! I see the sofastats_recovery folder, and a lot of different sofastats folders, each with a "projs" folder with a "default.proj" file that for some reason I cannot open--SOFA Stats seems to not be available as an application to open the file. I still can't find the file with the original name I gave to my data table, though I might just be a bit sleep deprived at this point. 

Could the file I'm looking for be one of these "default.proj" files even though I originally named it something else? I'm using a Mac, so I'm not sure if maybe that's significant somehow. Thanks again for you help and all your wonderful work!

Lindsay

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Grant Paton-Simpson

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May 1, 2016, 4:42:08 AM5/1/16
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Hi Lindsay,


On 01/05/16 20:25, Lindsay Merrill wrote:
Hi Grant, 

Thank you for such a fast reply! I see the sofastats_recovery folder, and a lot of different sofastats folders, each with a "projs" folder with a "default.proj" file that for some reason I cannot open
default.proj is just a text file. It can be viewed in a text editor. But it isn't your data - that is in _internal/sofa_db. Your variable details are in the vdts folder - the .vdts are just text files too. I recommend taking a copy of your sofastats folder before doing anything else. The data tables are inside the sofa_db SQLite database all going well.

--SOFA Stats seems to not be available as an application to open the file. I still can't find the file with the original name I gave to my data table, though I might just be a bit sleep deprived at this point. 

Could the file I'm looking for be one of these "default.proj" files even though I originally named it something else? I'm using a Mac, so I'm not sure if maybe that's significant somehow.
Worth knowing. I don't use Windows either preferring Ubuntu Linux.

Thanks again for you help and all your wonderful work!
Greetings from New Zealand :-)

The following may be helpful - please let me know how it goes:

Step 1. Rename sofastats folder sofastats_backup
Step 2. Restart SOFA (will make fresh sofastats folder)
Step 3. Close SOFA
Step 4. Copy _internal/sofa_db from sofastats_backup into freshly-created sofastats folder
Step 5. Open SOFA and see if data tables there
Step 6. Copy across vdt file to appropriate location as well to reuse the variable details you probably spent ages configuring
Success?

All the best,
Grant

Lindsay Merrill

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May 1, 2016, 10:44:28 AM5/1/16
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Hi Grant, 

Thank you again for all your help! I tried the steps you listed above several times with several of the folders (with the newly named sofastats_backup being the folder that was last modified around the time that I seemed to have lost my data) and the data tables still don't show up when I close and reopen SOFA. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. The sofastats_backup folder is in username / sofastats_backup, while (as far as I can tell) the freshly created sofastats folder is in username / sofastats / backup / Users 2 / username / sofastat

Does that sounds about right to you? Please let me know if you have any other additional thoughts or ideas. Thank you again for all your help and for the program!

Lindsay

Grant Paton-Simpson

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May 1, 2016, 3:04:41 PM5/1/16
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The data will either exist in one of the sofa_dbs or nowhere so perhaps see if any of the sofa_dbs are larger than the others or use them with your main system one by one till you find it? It's a little bit tricky to advise from a distance in case I've misunderstood something. How much data is at stake? How much time of data entry/importing etc?

And look for a vdt that has been modified too - you'll want to keep that one.

Lindsay Merrill

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May 3, 2016, 2:31:29 PM5/3/16
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Hi Grant, 

Thanks again for your help with this. I just went ahead and re-imported and recoded everything and it didn't end up taking as long as I had anticipated. I'll be pushing that "Run Backup" button much more frequently from now :) Thank you again!

Best, 

Lindsay

Grant Paton-Simpson

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May 3, 2016, 3:41:09 PM5/3/16
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All's well that ends well :-)
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