Whole chapter Luke 3 gone

[Johannes “RevivalOfLove” Venzke]

Hello,

I translate Matthew, Mark and Luke from Greek to German and I use the version of Bibledit from the Ubuntu repository (5.1.002). I worked with some lists (li) and the visual editor didn't do what I wanted to do. I wanted to have the verse numbers at the end of the list entry. 

For some reason the chapter editor and the USFM editor don't work anymore. No matter what change I made, I got the message "change of text length is too large". I raised the admitted percentage to 100% and now the whole chapter Luke 3 is gone. It's the work of weeks or even months I lost today. Only the first heading is left. Is there a possibility to restore the text somehow? I don't use cloud synchronisation. It seems to be a bug. I work with Bibledit for years now and the USFM editor always worked.

Best.

[Teus Benschop]

Hello Johannes,

There's multiple safeguards for your Bible text that normally should have been set up and be used regularly. 

Some of these are:

1. Regular backups of the local computer.

2. Leave the admitted percentage change low.

3. Export the Bible to USFM manually regularly and keep copies.

4. Connect to a Cloud system.

5. Connect the Cloud system to a git repository.

6. Letting the Cloud system email the changes to users.

7. Multiple local copies of saved chapters.

Based on the description of the situation at your end, it could be that option 1 can help.

If not then option 7 could help too.

More information about option 7:

In your home folder, say, /home/foo/bibledit/bibles, there the Bibles are stored and several copies of each edited chapter. The Bible books in that folder are numbered, where Luke is number 42. Then inside folder "42", there's the chapter folders of Luke. Each chapter contains a couple of previous versions of the chapter, in fles like 100000001, 100000002, and so on. These might help you to get the lost text back.

If this is a bug, you may open a bug report at https://github.com/bibledit/cloud/issues, with a description of the USFM code that led to this problem.

I hope you may be able to recover the lost text again soon.

Teus

[Johannes “RevivalOfLove” Venzke]

Hello Teus,

thank you for your fast answer. I do have backups (USFM exports), but not of the third chapter (shame on me). I don't have a cloud. In the folder "42" ⟶ "3" there are really 1184 files. The last one (100001184) contains the almost empty chapter. The predecessor (100001183) contains my state before the problem - I'm very thankful about this. What should I do now? Delete the last one? Thank you very much. I think this is a bug, because the USFM editor and the chapter editor don't work on this chapter, but they do work on different chapters. I can post the content of the chapter wherever you want. Maybe the lists are the problem.

Best, Johannes.

[Johannes “RevivalOfLove” Venzke]

I changed the percentage temporarily to 100%, copied the content of the next to last file into the USFM editor and everything seems to be fine now. In this chapter (Luke 3) there is a second \c without a number below the right \c 3. This could also be the source of the problem. In all other chapters (Matthew 1-26, Mark 1-16, Luke 1-2), the USFM and chapter editors work, but I will try to post it on github.

Thank you for your help.

[Teus Benschop]

Hello Johannes,

I am glad it works again and that the text has been recovered.

Thanks too for the new issue on GitHub with the files attached and so on. This goes a long way fixing the problem and delivering a better experience to the people. Good luck and happy translating, and blessings.

Teus Benschop