Restore a form?

[Glen Forister]

I want to restore one Form in my “My Forms” document that contains 67 Forms.

Mac desktop, on my way to use Advanced Find and Replace, my mouse activated “Delete”. I don’t know which record got deleted. I tried “File/Recover Deleted Items”, but nothing was on the list (for just that Form or all Forms?).

From the manual it sounds like the only thing that can be “restored” is the “My Forms” that holds all 67 Forms. That won’t do.

What happens if I just want 1 Form, or 1 record from 1 Form restored?

[Brendan]

If the form didn’t appear in the Recover Deleted Items function, you would need to re-import a .tfarc file that you had previously made. However, I’m guessing you probably don’t have one of those.

The Recover Deleted Items function will not work if you had compacted the database after the delete. That may be why it didn’t show up there.

But if you’d like to email me a backup of your whole document, I can poke around inside the database to see if there’s anything recoverable.

[Glen Forister]

The record isn’t important enough to warrant work. But the next problem might be.

BUT, the fact that all those backups I have are useless unless I want to replace all my Forms and lose all the data in any or all 67 Forms since the last backup is appalling. Also, I guess I’ll never compact them again since I’ll never know when something might happen and I need that deleted information. I had compacted it because I had been doing some experimenting with Scripts and other features and after the session I was deleting records and Forms.

The only way to have a backup is to archive all 67 Forms individually? That is ridiculous.

Also, where is the option to engage a window “Are you sure you want to delete this record” with a yes or no/cancel option is almost unheard of in programs.

Disappointed… In the past with my other database program there were many times I had to resort to a backup file and replace the original with that file. That program backed up each “Form” into a separate file and was a real backup. Sure, it took longer to sync and backup, but it worked and your system doesn’t.

[Brendan]

Hi Glen,

There is a warning when deleting records. Unless you turned warnings off for that.

You can reset warnings on the Preferences/Settings window. There’s a button for that.

You can always open up a backup file and then export an individual form from that as a .tfarc file and import it into your original database document.

But if you have sync turned on, it will sync the backup file. So you’d want to disable sync before you restored.

Alternatively if you use the Export Tap Forms Archive command to make backup archives instead of the regular Backup command, you could make a new document and import that .tfarc file and then just export the one form you want to restore as an archive and then import that one archive file for that one form into your original database document.

So there are ways to do what you want.

Thanks,

Brendan

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[Glen Forister]

Thanks for the reply.
1 – Re: warning for deleted record. I can’t find that setting in TF. In TG, There is no “Preferences/Settings”. There is a Top Menu – “Tap Froms Mac 5″/Settings” window but I don’t see that warning button there.
I looked at OSX Ventura Menu “Apple/System Settings/Notifications/Tap Forms Mac/ Allow Notifications”. Is that the button you are referring to? I tried it out, and that does the job. I didn’t know that would turn off that notification and I did turn it off because many programs notify me to death. Next time give a reasonable location for the answer.

2. Re: restoring a record in a Form. I feel like I’m about to juggle with eggs and if I get something wrong there will be a disaster that isn’t recoverable.
Could you please provide directions, not in sentence form, but itemized procedure format. It is so complicated I could easily lose everything.
– Since this is such an important part of the program, I’m surprised you don’t have it laid out already for people.

The record I lost isn’t that important, but when I do lose something (it will happen eventually) as I have in the past with my old database. Files get corrupted, or an accident happens. I need to have experience with this before the emergency occurs.

Thanks.

[Brendan]

I was referring to the Reset button on the General settings panel. See attachment.

To export a Tap Forms Archive:

1. Open your document you want to export.
2. Select the form you want to export.
3. Select File > Export Tap Forms Archive
4. Decide if you want to export the whole document or just the selected form.
5. Click the checkboxes for the forms you want to export.
6. Click the top-most checkbox to select them all at once with one click.
7. Click the Export button. Save it somewhere you’ll remember later.
8. Make a new document by selecting New Document from the File menu.
9. Select Import Tap Forms Archive from the File menu.
10. Find your .tfarc file and import it into the new document.

You could also just use the Duplicate Document command to make a copy of your document and then at anytime later you could generate an archive of a specific form that you wanted to restore.

Right now the Backup & Restore function is just a built-in way of zipping your document and unzipping the backup file. So it’s an all or nothing scenario. Perhaps I need to work on a new backup and restore system that uses the archive mechanism and lets you select from a backup file, which forms you want to restore from the archive. I’ll think about that.

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[Glen Forister]

Thanks for the clearer steps. I’ll study them more.

And, yes, please think about changes. When somebody is in distress due to a serious problem, the last thing they want to do is spend half to a full day figuring out how to get back to normal and in a rush making a fatal mistake and losing everything.

[Author]

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