Outline scrambled, items missing, old text returned, etc.

My to-do list outline has suddenly become scrambled. On the desktop app, large chunks of it have gone missing. A bunch of text I just added and changes I made are gone. It’s not in sync with the mobile app, they’re still mostly there. But even on mobile, some old items I deleted are back again, and some changes I made a couple of days ago have been reverted, though other changes I made just now are still there. Some sub-items keep showing up under the wrong parent; I moved them back yesterday, but now they’re there again. Both apps are somewhat scrambled, but in different ways - many new things missing, but not all; a bunch of old things showing up again, a mix of new and old versions, and different versions on the different apps.

I’m afraid to touch anything, because there are a bunch of things I really need that are still showing in the mobile app, that are now gone from the desktop app. I’m returning from a transatlantic trip in less than 48 hours, and I’ve been dealing with the flight arrangements, plus a funeral, selling a house, and so on, organizing everything in Legend. That seems like a mistake right now. It’s 3am and I’m completely swamped with things I need to do before my flight. You can imagine that having my to-do list blown up at this particular moment is inconvenient, to say the least… can anyone help me recover it, or at least somehow save the data from my phone before it disappears too?

The last thing I remember doing that was a bit unusual was I added a third outline pane to the “Mobile” board on the desktop. It showed up on the iOS app, and seemed to work. I opened another document in it and wrote some text in it on the desktop. Then a few minutes later I noticed that everything had become scrambled in the previous pane, in a different document.

[edit: I didn’t see the comment above that was posted while I was writing - see next comment]

Jay It doesn’t really sound like the same problem. I think I moved one item to another document a few days ago, but otherwise not. I haven’t moved any of the stuff that’s gone missing. Also, it’s not just missing things, it’s really scrambled. There are things that I’m sure I deleted that are now back, things moved around on their own, changes I made a day or two being undone, and the discrepancy between the mobile app and the desktop… Changes I make are still syncing live between them, like filtering, expanding/collapsing, etc., even though the document on each is very different from the other now. I’m afraid to make any further changes. To make matters worse, I had made just one large “notes” document that contains many sections on different topics.

Anyway, the big question is how do I reclaim the data, if possible? I do have backups turned on, but I don’t see any from yesterday, before this happened. There are some from the day before, but I made a bunch of changes yesterday. I’ve spent a couple of hours now trying to piece it together. Right now I’m manually re-typing stuff from my phone screen into a different app so I don’t lose it and can continue with my tasks. I don’t have time to re-type the whole section though, nevermind the whole document…

Ok, I just tried to filter on some of the missing text in the second pane where I’ve been editing it, and it didn’t work. Then I tried a global search, which found it, still in the same document. I clicked on the search result and it opened the document in the first pane, and the missing items are there, but in the wrong places. They should be all together in the one “to do” section, but some are at the very beginning of the document right after the first project heading, some at an unrelated place halfway through the document, and others are at the very end - not where they should be, and not where the are on the mobile app. At least one of them is something I’m sure I already deleted.

I tried exporting it as OPML, and when I import it into Circus Ponies Notebook, it’s the same thing - text is missing from where it should be, but shows up with some of it at the top of the document, some in the middle, and some at the very end.

Jay [edit: it must have been before the update - I only now got a notification in the desktop app about the update] After the update - then when I signed in in Safari, it looked ok again. If I do “logout” in the desktop app, it says “you have unsaved changes that will be lost if you log out - are you sure?” - I did it anyway, as far as I can tell it looks ok now. I also signed out and back in on the mobile app, and it looks ok now too. I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t related to the update/bug you mentioned, maybe just needed to reload, but I was afraid to sign out and in again because I didn’t want to lose the data that I still could see on the phone but not the desktop.

The data had been moved, for example, data from the children of one item hadn’t been reordered exactly, but had been split up and moved to three different places quite far from each other in the document. Both the desktop and the mobile apps were messed up, but in different ways. The mobile app still had the text missing from the desktop, in the right place, but it also had old items that had been deleted.

Jay I’m still having some problems, running the updated versions of both apps. A bunch of items just went missing from the iOS app, but not the desktop. Maybe it has to do with another problem, lately when I open the mobile app, often (once a day or so) it’s just a black screen, and I have to force-quit. Then sometimes it loads, or sometime it’s a black screen that says “loading” but never ends and I have to force-quit and restart it again. That happened just now, and afterwards the items were missing. After I signed out and back in, they came back. Maybe that’s a different problem, I don’t know.

It’s disconcerting to have things silently disappearing from my to-do and planning list. And if I’m away from the computer, it’s really inconvenient to sign out and in again, because I don’t have the passwords with me.