Export, save, etc. a previous version of the text from Project History

Question

On 2016-07-28 20:44, I wrote to PT Supporters under subject “Recover text from Paratext online repository?”:

If I were looking for chapters in previous points in the Project History, I wouldn’t restore to each point. Instead I’d use the Compare Texts… feature, which allows you to view any point in the history.

So, you can use Compare Texts to view the text as it was at any particular point in the Project History. But it’s harder to do other things with a previous version of the texts, such as:

• Print
• Print Draft
• Save as RTF
• Export to Pathway

You could restore to the point you want, and then restore back to the current version after exporting/saving, but that creates a mess in the Project History – I commented in the same posting as above:

If you want to view a previous point by restoring to that point, you’re then likely to undo that restore. That’s two more points in the history, and if you do it repeatedly, you end up with a very complex history!

Despite that, I think I have seen others recommend the “double-restore” as a way to work with a previous version of a project.

But personally, I wish there was an easy way to do all operations that you are able to do on the current text, on a previous version. Worth a Feature Request?

Answer 1

With some manual copying and editing, you can make a copy of your project with the project history, so you can restore books in your copy to a previous point, without cluttering the history of your active project.

1. With Paratext closed, go to your settings folder (usually C:\My Paratext Projects) in Windows Explorer.

2. Select the folder for your project, press Ctrl-C for copy, then Ctrl-V for paste. Windows will make a copy of the folder and add “- Copy” to the end of the folder name. Whatever the name of this folder is will be the short name of the copied project. Paratext won’t accept a project short name with a space so you need to rename this folder to something without a space.

3. Now find the .SSF file for your project. It will have the same name as your short project name. Do a copy and paste of this file. Change its name to match the folder name if you changed the folder name.

   indent preformatted text by 4 spaces

4. Edit your newly copied .SSF file in Notepad.

   a. Change the project short name between and to the new name.
   b. Change the folder name between and to match the new folder name.
   c. If you wish to change the project long name, edit it between and

5. Now start Paratext. You should be able to open the copy of your project, go into View Project history, restore to the point you want and then do the printing or exporting you want.

Paratext will let you send and receive your copied project, which you probably do not want to do. Not only could it be confusing for your teammates which project is which, it might be confusing for the project server, since this copied project will have the same digital ID as the original project. You can keep yourself from inadvertently selecting your copied project to send and receive by deleting the “ProjectUsers.XML” file from inside the copied project folder. This will make it an unshared project.

Comments

Thanks, this is helpful advice. Maybe it’s goign to get easier in PT8 – at least I know that you can backup and restore a project with its history, which means that if a project’s short name is not to your liking, you have a friendly way to change it. (I want to rename all our majority and minority language projects so that the short name begins with the 3-letter ISO code for the language.

sewhite:

…
a. Change the project short name between and to the new name.
b. Change the folder name between and to match the new folder name.
c. If you wish to change the project long name, edit it between and
…

Can you clarify what you mean by “between”?

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wdavidhj:

Can you clarify what you mean by “between”?

I think the forum lost the ‘>’ and ‘<’ marks. I think the sentence should be “Change the project short name between ‘>’ and ‘<’ to the new name.”

wdavidhj:

at least I know that you can backup and restore a project with its history, which means that if a project’s short name is not to your liking, you have a friendly way to change it.

I’m curious where you heard this. Backup/restore will never allow you to keep the history as that can create horrible problems with S/R.

EDIT: Realized you might be talking about the steps that sewhite gave. Beware that you can create huge problems when following those steps and doing a S/R. Paratext will consider those two projects to be different, but the S/R server will consider them to be the same. In addition to probably mangling the project history, the other users on the project will likely run into problems when they S/R the results of the initial S/R after that “name change”.

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Sorry, I didn’t realize this forum would strip out the XML codes. I’ve edited the post now, is it understandable. I refer to XML codes within the .SSF file.

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Right. After I posted I realised that there were probably some tags between angle brackets that had been stripped. It’s worth looking at the preview pane to the right of the edit pane in the Web interface.

Also see this post of mine: More markdown that we could use?

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anon291708:

EDIT: Realized you might be talking about the steps that sewhite gave.

No, I wasn’t talking about sewhite’s post, I was talking about something I’d heard about PT8. Don’t know were I heard it, but the context was my asking how I could change the short name of a project; I was told that it would be possible in PT8, and that this (what I described) was how. If PT8 allowed a backup to include the history, but then did not allow that backup to be restored to the original project, but only to a new one, wouldn’t that work OK?

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wdavidhj:

I was told that it would be possible in PT8, and that this (what I described) was how.

Ah, I see. It’s not done through backup/restore, but there is a new option (added in 7.6, actually) to do this (Tools > Advanced > Convert Project). This will always create a new project and will make a copy of the history so it is not lost. It also allows you to change the names of users in the history and a few other things that can only be done by creating a full copy of the project history.

wdavidhj:

If PT8 allowed a backup to include the history, but then did not allow that backup to be restored to the original project, but only to a new one, wouldn’t that work OK?

Unfortunately, this is not good enough as the ID of a project comes from the project history so the history needs to be completely separate. Convert Project does this by creating a copy of the entire project history, but with new IDs so the project will be identified as a separate project.

Note: Because it creates a complete copy of the project history, it can actually take an hour or more to run this command.