Salvaging an improperly saved TiddlyWiki

[Valikhanov]

I'm using TiddlyWiki classic, and have a problem: When my Tiddly wasn't saving properly (because I hadn't worked out the Firefox plugin), I "saved as" to override and preserve my changes. Which was a mistake, because now it seems that I've broken the system; I get an error message ("It appears that this TiddlyWiki has been incorrectly saved") and am now unable to edit some of the cells. This is a problem, because I do not have recent backups saved, and do not want to lose the information I added.

How can I restore the integrity of my TiddlyWiki without losing information? Many thanks in advance.

[Tristan Kohl]

You could try to get a fresh empty version and import your existing wiki into it. That brought one of my wikis back to life when my browser crashed during save and I had changed a big load of tiddlers since the last backup (the evening before).

Cheers,
Tristan

[whatever]

Hey!
See these threads:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/tiddlywiki/SaveToClipboard%7Csort:relevance/tiddlywiki/lLWnlHXBL4Q/uO0XD4E96cIJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/tiddlywiki/iMgOD2QarSA/Lvpzjz2rfScJ

Basically, you need to:

1. Open a new tab in IE, and make sure that the bookmark toolbar is visible

2. Visit http://www.tiddlytools.com/#SaveToClipboard

3. Drag the link labelled "save to clipboard" from the "Example" section of that tiddler to your bookmark toolbar

4. Switch to the tab containing your TW

5. Click the bookmarklet

6. Switch to a text editor and paste your file, and save it

It may be worth visiting tiddlywiki.com in a new tab, and trying the bookmarklet out with that tab first.

w
PS: I forgot if it saves the entire TW or just the storeArea div, so make sure you check first.

[Valikhanov]

Thanks very much for your help. But I still haven't managed to get it to work.

I am running a Mac and don't have IE. (Though if IE is the only option, I could try doing this from my work computer.)

When I try using that link to copy to the clipboard from Firefox, it 'works,' but then when I open the new version after pasting to a text document, I get the same TiddlyWiki file with the same error message.

When I use the copy to clipboard link from Chrome or Safari, it seems to copy it in Tiddly format instead of HTML, such that when I open it I have a text document instead of a TiddlyWiki.

Advice?

[Valikhanov]

Okay, I've followed the steps on IE, and still have the same problem: it exports the Tiddly format, not HTML (i.e. when I open it I just get the plain text notes with asterisks, etc.). 

I am starting to get the impression that with one impetuous save-as I have permanently broken one of my TiddlyWiki files. Any suggestions for salvaging it, before I start looking for other systems?

[Birthe C]

Hi Valikhanov,

Maybe an explanation of why it went so wrong with your TiddlyWiki classic http://classic.tiddlywiki.com/#SaveUnpredictabilities.

Did you  try to download  fresh empty Tiddlywiki and import the old troublesome into that one?


Birthe

[Douglas Counts]

Simply importing the tiddlers into a new empty wiki will fix this.  The edits done before your last save though will be gone because those were not saved within the file but within the browser's memory.

After downloading a new "empty.html" TiddlyWiki from the website, open the empty TW and go to its Tools > Import and select your damaged file.  You will see all your tiddlers listed there.  Uncheck any that you don't want to be imported, then do the import and save. Done.......

-Doug

[Eric Shulman]

On Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 2:03:14 PM UTC-7, Douglas Counts wrote:

Simply importing the tiddlers into a new empty wiki will fix this.  The edits done before your last save though will be gone because those were not saved within the file but within the browser's memory.After downloading a new "empty.html" TiddlyWiki from the website, open the empty TW and go to its Tools > Import and select your damaged file.  You will see all your tiddlers listed there.  Uncheck any that you don't want to be imported, then do the import and save. Done.......

The question is about TW *Classic*, so downloading a new TW5 empty.html won't help.  To download a new *Classic* empty.html, go to http://classic.tiddlywiki.com and then click the green "download" button.  You can then try importing the damaged file into the freshly downloaded empty, by using the Backstage>Import command.   However, importing a damaged TWClassic file into an empty TWClassic typically only works for minor file corruption problems, and may not work if the storeArea of the source file has been seriously corrupted in some way.

Fortunately, all TW files are stored as plain text so, as a worst case, you can always open the file using a simple text editor and "rescue" the damaged data.

If you search in for the text, "storeArea", you should be able to find the beginning of the tiddler data within the file.  Each tiddler is defined using separate <div>...</div> blocks within the storeArea, where the properties of each <div> are the fields of the tiddler (except for the text content), and the inside of the div holds the text content (wiki syntax source) for the tiddler.

Once you find the desired tiddler defintions, you can then use copy/paste to transfer the content into new tiddlers created in a fresh empty.html.  Then, hand-edit each reconstructed tiddler to fix up any corrupt content (sometimes Unicode characters are mangled in the copy/paste process).  Of course, this can be very tedious if there's been lots of corruption, but if your information is really vital, it *is* still possible to reconstruct it in this manner.

hope this helps,

-e

Eric Shulman

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