Backup/Restore Questions

[Jim Burgess]

Thanks for the efforts to produce a manual for the Mac version. Unfortunately it is a bit sparse regarding backup/restore and import/export between platforms. I have these questions:

1. Is backup/restore compatible between platforms? I.e., can I restore a backup made on the Mac to a an iPad or iPhone (and vice-versa) without any glitches or incompatible features showing up that will require manual corrections?

2. If I let TapForms do automatic backups, where specifically are they located so that I can FTP them to an iOS device?

3. If I export a form that includes photos from an iOS device, what are the exact steps required to import that form, including its photos, into a Mac version? And what are the steps for going the other direction, i.e., from Mac to iOS versions?

4. How do I restore the Mac version of TapForms’ database from a time-machine backup or from a cloned backup (like CC Cloner)?

Thanks.

[Brendan]

Hi Jim,

Well I’ll need a whole manual written up to answer all these questions :-) But I’ll try to summarize here:

1. Yes. You can backup on Mac and restore to iOS. And vice versa. A backup file just compresses the SQLite database file and all the folders for photos, etc. When you restore, all Tap Forms is doing is unzipping the file. The iOS and Mac versions use the same structure for the database, so therefore the backup and restore are compatible between platforms.

2. Click the Show Files button on the Mac version to find out where Tap Forms stores the backup files.

3. Ultimately I would like to do something like what I have with the Bento Template Importer. A Bento template is really just a folder that includes the form template, the data, and all the media. Tap Forms is obviously able to import that now. Generating a file like that takes a bit of work and it’s something that I would like to do for a future update. But for now you need to import the CSV file that gets generated using the Import Records function and then manually copy the photos into the Photos folder in the Tap Forms container (changes depending on if you have iCloud enabled or not). It’s a bit tricky on iOS because there’s no Finder to copy files into the Tap Forms’ Photos folder. So you need to use the FTP server and copy them into the Photos folder that way.

4. The database file is called TapForms_db.sqlite. You can find it here: /Users//Library/Containers/Data/Documents. Just restore it from there using Time Machine.

I hope that helps a bit.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Jim Burgess]

Brendan…thanks for your detailed response. I’ll be adding it to my ‘personal wiki’ for TapForms.

Regarding a restore from Time Machine, wouldn’t I have to also restore the ‘Photos’ folder and other supporting files in addition to the database?

All this came about because of a literal disaster I had when I upgraded the Mac version. I cannot be sure which of the many steps I took caused the problem, but I had to try every means possible to get a valid Tapforms database restored. Somehow in the course of many syncs between devices, exports, imports, and restores my Tapforms data became corrupted. Two of the obvious symptoms are that (1) dates of all existing entries in the database have been shifted to one day earlier for all forms, and (2) CSV imports that include currency format with negative values, e.g., “($12.34)” now show up as blank, and are not included in totals. These are a couple of major problems that you should be aware of. I’ll try to do some additional testing as time permits and let you know what I find.

Thanks.

[Asbukke Ni]

iPhone backup problem ,you can use iTuens and iCloud to backup iPhone data.When you lost data ,you can extract backup files data easily .

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