Is there a way to restore damaged notes file in PT8?

Question

A user in a PT8 project has lost all his notes after April 8. I looked at the Notes_(username).xml file for this project and all the entries after April 8 have this line in them.

deleted

All entries with the above tag also do not contain the tag in the entry.

The start of this problem was his Anti Virus removed Paratext. A tech helped him get Paratext re-installed and working and after that he noticed his notes had disappeared.

What is the process to restore Notes from a user to an earlier date to try to recover those lost comments? I see in the .hg\store\data folder that it looks like there may be versions of the notes files. Is there a way to recover those from an earlier date?

I tried to restore from an earlier date, but it seemed to only restore text and did not restore notes.

Thanks.
anon291708
MXB

Answer 1

The deleted state in the file just means that the notes were resolved. You can see them all by creating a custom filter in the notes list window:

Then make sure you are viewing notes in All Books.

Comments

Hi, I must have confused the problem by giving the information about the “deleted” tag. The issue is something happened to the Notes_Elias Espino.xml file. If I look at Project History, there are many entries by Elias Espino saying he edited Notes. All (most) of his notes from April are missing. On April 10 there is a mark in the project history referencing his Notes file. My question is: "Are notes files able to be restored/recovered from an earlier date? If so, how? If not, I will let Elias know that his notes are all lost for April. Thanks again.
anon291708

Answer 2

Can you tell us the name of the project and the user’s name (if they’re not sensitive) or sent me a PM so we can look into this?

Comments

My understanding from emails is multiple computers, single user registration.

Project: Chitwan Tharu

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Hi, the project that has the damaged notes file is: oteU. The user’s name is Elias Espino so the file that is missing recent notes is Notes_Elias Espino.xml

Thanks.

anon291708

Answer 3

I see. It looks like his whole file got deleted on April 9, for some reason. A new, empty file was created on April 10.

Yes the notes can be restored. I’ll send you an e-mail with a fixed file that will contain all the deleted notes and the notes he’s created since then. You can then replace that file with the one in the project. Just make sure he doesn’t do anything with notes until then to make sure any edits are not lost.