Well, things got a little hairy for a few minutes. I’ll admit that I wasn’t exactly making it easy on the app, but that’s our job, right? 😉
I basically have 3 instances of Legend on windows desktop. One runs on the “shop” computer, and my “good” computer has Work and Personal users, each running Legend. All logged in to the same account. I’ve been doing this for most of the last year without trouble.
Over the last week I have tested switching to beta – and back – in all three places. I always ended up back in stable. But I recently realized all three instances were showing different document contents, with the point of divergence being sometime in the last week.
I exported my docs and signed out of all three instances & mobile app. I don’t use web. Rebooted both computers. Logged back in to my “good” computer (with stable) and found a nice little mess:
- I have a “My First Document”
- Most of my documents have been duplicated.
- One of them – of course, the most important – is not duplicated; it exists but is empty.
- My other most-important document is duplicated but one instance is showing up strangely in the Overview drawer: it is “indented” (twice) and plain font, as if it’s a parent beneath the document above it…but the doc above it is the empty one. There’s no “>” to expand/collapse it. When I click this glitchy one, the Pane zooms itself to a deep branch of the document
- I can drag to reorder docs but each time I do, one of my ‘testing’ documents spawns another copy, even if it’s nowhere nearby.
- My Boards remained intact, except for some changes to the Mobile Board that I did just yesterday. This makes sense because I rarely change my Boards.
Upon seeing this, I didn’t do anything else in the app. I logged out and right back in again. Now all the dupes are gone, I still have “my first document”, Boards are OK, the glitching doc is gone, and the document that had been emptied out is now just completely gone. One other document is now also gone, that was not previously missing.
I have the backups and can fix all this up. What’s distressing is that ‘stable’ was not a safe haven. The very act of trying beta seems to have wrecked what was in stable.
UPDATE: I imported back the one document I lost from backup. When I return to the Boards which should be pointed to that document, I see that they have retained their Panes and Filters, but are pointing to something weird. It is NOT the copy of the document I just re-imported, which has the same name. They all seem to be pointing to a ghost version of that document, that only has one top-level branch. In the overview drawer, no doc is highlighted or expanded, as it would be when a Pane is zoomed. When I zoom out in any of those Panes, I am just seeing this one-branch document, which still doesn’t register in the Overview drawer.
Oh yeah, and a BUNCH of mirrors are now either (deleted item) or a gibberish item ID inside parentheses. I really wish we had more tools for repairing deleted items, since they seem to happen pretty regularly. I wish Legend could somehow ‘remember’ what the item-text used to be, which would at least give me a way to repair the break. (deleted item) is basically just saying, “Hey, I lost your data, good luck”. And yes, losing an instance of a mirror, even if there is still an intact instance somewhere else, does count as data loss to me. If a mirror goes missing or broken that means some connection or sequence that was important enough to document is now gone. What really sucks here is that I can’t even recover these mirrors by importing a backup. I guess the document IDs are changed or something, making the references invalid? We really need mirrors to be more durable. I don’t want to stop using them because they are so damned useful and powerful…but this fragility is worrying.
I can leave some of these in place for a little while but have to patch up a few of them manually to get some work done.
