Lost data – don't understand how Tap Forms saves

[Peter Laundy]

Discovered on opening TapForms yesterday that I’d lost a lot of items I had recently entered. I made an archive of where I was, added them all back in.
Tried to save but always found “save” greyed out. Opened and closed tap forms to confirm that everything new I’d entered was saved.

Then I had problems with my Mac and rebooted without saving my TapForms data.
When I reopened none of the reentry work that I had spent an hour or more on was saved. I was back to what I had archived even though I’d checked by opening and closing Tap Forms that all my changes had been captured.

The data I am keeping in TapForms is critical. I am getting discouraged that saving is really flaky on it.

Am hoping there is someplace that I can go to open up the version with all the lost data.

Peter Laundy.

[Brendan]

Hi Peter,

I’m sorry for this trouble.

If you have a power failure or shut your computer down abruptly without quitting Tap Forms first, then that can unfortunately cause corruption in the SQLite database file.

Saving is done as you do things. That Save button in the File menu is only active when the Note field window editor is opened.

You can create a new document and then import your archive files. Or you can restore from a recent backup.

[Peter Laundy]

Still having problems recovering from this issue.

I worked on the version I wrote you about to add back the lost new records to by Image Usage Rights Form, and to add the lost adjustments to a few of its pick lists and to field order. Throughout this work, all the pick-list and field order changes stayed stable: once I changed them I was able to use them on the lost image rights records I again added again as well as to edit the records that had not been lost to take advantage of the pick-list and field order changes. I then backed up.

Coming to it today, launching Tap Forms and opening my file in the “open recent” dropdown as well as opening the backup .zip file, I find that in both the new records are there but none of the pick-list or field order changes came through. These have reverted back to earlier versions.

Basically, it is giving me false confidence that my adjustments to form design are working by accepting them and letting me use them to create new records and edit old ones, and then not saving them on closing down Tap Forms.

I thought one of the features of Tap Forms is that it gives one the flexibility to adjust forms as you learn how they can be improved by using them. Is that not the case?

[Brendan]

Can you email me the file and I’ll check the integrity of it?

There’s no limit to how many changes you can make to your forms or pick lists after they’ve been created.

If you command-click on the filename in the titlebar of the window, Tap Forms will show you the path to the file. Make sure you’re not opening an older version of your file sitting somewhere else on your drive.

[Peter Laundy]

Brendan,
What is your email address?
All I have is forums@ and noreply@ addresses.

Also, attached is a screen capture of the path to the file. It looks right to me. Just wanted to make sure it is in the proper location.

Peter

Attachments:

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[Brendan]

Sorry. It’s on my support page listed as support@tapforms.com

The path looks fine as long as you don’t have another copy of it one level higher.

[Tyson Schoeber]

I have also been noticing that some data seems to be getting lost in TF5 in one of my databases. I have not yet come up with an explanation but I am not using the sync function with this file so that’s not the problem!

The total number of records in this database sometimes gets reduced. For example, I had 65 records one day last week. I did not delete anything but found that the next time I opened that file, I had only 63 records. I have backups but it is hard to figure out which records were lost.

Does anyone have any ideas on what the problem might be?

[Brendan]

Hi Tyson,

If you would like to send me a backup and the current database I can try and find out what happened.

[Susan Brenner]

I have a similar problem. I often find that when I make a change in a record it doesn’t get saved. Every time I quit I have to go back and look for blanks. There must be a better way.

I have not checked whether I am losing entire records, but in future I’ll make a note of how many records I have when I last quit or backed up. That would be very disturbing since I have more than 25,000 records, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine which ones might be missing.

[Brendan]

Hi Susan,

You might want to turn on the Backup on Quit function to make sure you have recent backups of any changed data. Which view do you use to make changes to your records? There are currently 3 places to make changes. The multi-column list view, the Default Layout, and any of your custom layouts. It might help me to track down this issue if you could repeat the steps that cause this to happen and let me know how I can make it happen. Then I can work on a fix.

[Author]

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